COLLOQUIES, 



DESULTORY, BUT 



CHIEFLY UPON POETRY AND POETS; 



AN ELDER, ENTHUSIASTIC, 
AND AN APOa^^LE OF THE LAW. 



" One caveat, good Reader, and then God speed thee!— Do not open it at 
adventures, and by reading the broken pieces of two or three lines, judge it? 
but read it through, and then I beg pardon if thou dislikest it. Farewell !'' 

T. Adams. 



^^ 




LONDON: 

orr and co. and houlston and stoneman, 

romsey: lord an. 

MDCCCXLIV. 



>-0 



t 



PC 



K 



CONSIDERATION 
IS BESOUGHT FOK THE FOLLOWING PAGES, ON THE PLEA THAT THEY 
EMBODY WHAT IS PRESUMED ^TO HAVE BEEN THE FIRST UNWRITTEN 



BOOK. FROM SUCH AS MAY NOT PEREMPTORILY REFUSE TO HEAR 



more of this matter is intreated the extraordinary boon 
of a perusal of the prelude dedicatory. — the mechanical 
singularity therein adverted to, is not claimed for this 
edition, which contains additions to the original volume, 
but for a sentence tantamount to " reprint," pronounced 
over the former pages by presidents in the republic of 
letters, they might not have re-presented themselves in 
book-shape on a thronged stream, wherein none but the 
strong may swim. still the novel species of remor^ that 
impeded their first appearance on the surface, may possibly 
now help them into a surer current to the haven of the 
Reader's favor. 



HEADS OF CHAPTERS. 



CHAP. PAGE 

I.— INTRODUCTORY 1 

II.— THE OLD ENTHUSIAST'S SHELL, WITH A SAMPLE OF ITS 

ECHOES 33 

III.— THE ELDER PROFFERS AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH 59 

IV.— TURNING MAINLY UPON HOLY MOTHER 89 

v.— A FEW W^ORDS UPON SHAK3FEARE 139 

VI.— TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON....... ipS 

VII.— THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE 235 



TO PROFESSOE WILSON. 



Right- ADMIRED Sir, 

It miglit have very well comported with the line 
of argument adopted by a certain Pleader in a case 
of great notoriety to make light of the virtue of a 
NAME : — " Wliafs in a Name .?" The ardent advocate 
to whom I allude, might have been justified in pro- 
testing against the imdue influence of patronymics, 
considering they were synonymous with prejudices 
which the most impassioned pleading could not over- 
rule, and that their authority, had it been decisive, 
would have insisted on a nonsuit. His interrogative, 
however, is remarkably happy in the elasticity of its 
signification: / intend it to be read with another 
punctuation — What's in a Name ! and thus employ 
it to convey an emphatic converse meaning to that 
which it expresses in re Romeo Montague. 



11. 

The pages to which I venture to prefix a Name 
with Poesy " linked like leaves to flowers/' afford 
an habitation for sundry cogitative vagrancies over 
that delectable territory, rich in all floral luxuriance, 
which considerate Muses have fertilised for the health- 
ful holiday of young hearts, and for the reinvigoration 
of the world- wearied — to whom the " constant revo- 
lution of the same repeated cares" might else 

" make languid life 
A pedlar's pack, bowing the bearer down." 

It would, however, have required a reckless confidence 
in the benignity of Professor Wilson, to proffer 
these stray conceits as an acceptable thank-offering 
for many hours charmed pursuit of his efilorescent 
pen; — crude as they are in conception, and cramped 
in conformation, this presentation of them to a Poetic 
Mind would, if it were written, be indited with a 
trembling pinion. But certain peculiarities in the 
construction of the " habitation," encourage me to 
hope for a lenient scrutiny of its contents. 

Of the little volume* before you, one individual 
has been composer, and compositor and imprinter 

* The last Chapter did not appear in the original edition. 



througliout : — this circumstance is only noticeable,, 
inasmuch as it may be a mental and mechanical com- 
bination unprecedented^ but unimposing. Printers 
have been authors of renown ; and Methuselah, with 
a knowledge of the art, adequate materiel, the patience 
of Job, and sufhcient perseverance, might, singly, 
have completed a work, voluminous as the bulkiest 
Cyclopaedia of the present day. 

But the pen has been a stranger to the prose part 
of its composition, and the scribe's office subverted: 
— with the exception of acknowledged quotations, I 
have been unaided by a line of manuscript or other 
copy. There is a rhythmical extravaganza in the 
sixth chapter, which I very reluctantly signalize in 
this place, because the skeleton of twenty lines of it, 
or thereabouts, was pen-traced; the composing-stick 
has been otherwise my sole mechanical " help to com- 
position." Memory has supplied me with sentiments 
syllabled aforetime, to the occupation of three or four 
pages; so unpremeditated else were its contents, that 
when, as an employment for leisure, I commenced the 
chapter called Introductory, it heralded I knew not 
what. Evidences of a want of design and forethought 
will, I fear, too frequently recur to substantiate this 

A 2 



IV. 



fact, and to prevent an innocent illusion I should wish 
to create, that my " actors" are not " spirits," but 
independent personages, holding separate opinions, 
and endowed with the gift of tongues. 

In proportion as this explanation may be injurious 
to subsequent vraisemblance, it may propitiate the 
severe. The entire absence of a preconcerted plan 
from the beginning, may " show cause" why no pro- 
fessional uniqueness distinguishes a literary bantling, 
to which, possibly, the annals of printing may not 
" parallel a fellow." But having accustomed myself, 
at distant intervals, to simultaneous composition, I " 
had closed the first colloquy before it occurred to me 
that perseverance might accomplish a novelty. It was 
essential to uniformity that I should proceed in the 
plain style of execution in which I had commenced. 

I shall be fortunate. Sir, should its " plainness move 
you more than eloquence." The practical disadvan- 
tages inseparable to the mode pursued in its com- 
position, will (I repeat my hope,) modify the strictures 
of the considerate. 

C. L. LORDAN. 
Romsey, March, 1843. 



COLLOQUIES. 



COLLOQUIES, 

DESULTORY AND DIVERSE, BUT CHIEFLY UPON 
POETRY AND POETS. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

" There is Poetry that is not written. As I here use it, it is delicate percep- 
tion ; something which is in the nature, enabling one man to detect harmony, 
and know forms of beauty better than another. It is like a peculiar gift of 
vision, making the world we live in more visible. The poet hears music in com- 
mon sounds, and sees loveliness by the wayside. There is not a change in the 
sky, nor a sweet human voice, which does not bring him pleasure. He sees all 
the light and hears aU the music about him— and this is Poetry." 

Many thanks^, O cliarining Mary Russell Mitford ! 
for a short and satisfactory definition of a theme, 
whiclij when certain of our Poets essay to elucidate, 
dilates delectably for perusal, but fills with despair 
the seeker after a summary signification. Look, for 
instance, at that masterly and stirring reply to What 
is Poetry ? in an Appeal for Poets from the pen of 
Barton; — a glorious whole, which it were gothic to 
garble by quotation. A marvellous creature, by the 



% INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

way, that Bernard Barton — worthy of love and honor ! 
Hath Quakerism foregone its frigidness, or how came 
he in the cold cradle of his caste? and not he alone, 
but others, whom that same " frozen bosom" hath 
strangely quickened with poetic breath, and sent 
forth in poetic guise, lovely as " yellow cowslip and 
pale primrose from flowery lap of May." The Howitts 
among these, and especially Saint Mary! — where is 
verse more suiFused by Innocency than hers, — more 
guileless and gladsome, — more redolent with the air 
of the Garden anterior to the great Mother's misdeed? 
How easy — were the Law one whit less inexorable — 
how easy to conceive a mental reservation, made in 
Mary's favor, by Eve, before the Fall! 

. Among the multifarious subjects which, in our days, 
our fathers', and, perhaps, in annals yet more remote, 
have attracted, instructed, or diverted the public 
mind, what singular or individual subject has retained 
a potency so perennial as that of Poetry? Chrono- 
logers who descend to the minutiae of modern times, 
will, in all conscience, have need of flexible pens to 
pourtray faithfully the fluctuations of feeling and of 
general opinion which have characterised the age; 
— its web has indeed been of '^ a mingled yarn, good 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 3 

and ill together;" — and whether, in the judgment of 
posterity, glory or shame shall be deemed to pre- 
dominate in their review of the past proximate, the 
historian, if metrically inclined, may thus impartially 
usher in his lucubrations : — 

" Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep, and mourn, — 
For here there is much matter for all feeling-." 

But, (let us hope that the symptom be not necessarily 
vicious !) the mind created " upright," has of late ap- 
proved itself so fecund with " inventions,"* — has so 
diversely disported with fantasy, fanaticism, and folly, 
— that few of the swarming " topics of the day" can 
be dignified by the record or expected at the hands 
of the chronologer. The age has developed lineaments 
which, however, are British, or, in other words, are 
bold, vigorous, and philanthropic, and these will find 
an " habitation and a name" in the imperishable page ; 
— as to the host of bubbles, over whose birth trum- 
pets were blown, sometimes by fools, at others, by 
knaves — they have evaporated, as was inevitable, 
before the breath of 

" Time's old daughter, Truth." 
These, if they deserve the mention of their paternity, 

* " God made man upright, but they have sought out many in- 
ventions." — Ecclesiastes. 



1 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

were chiefly the offspring of Politics in a phrenzy ; 
but the " fitful fever" of the parent has subsided, 
and its morbid progeny sleep well. The mild genius 
of Poetry will probably experience in times future, 
as it has experienced recently, the strongest check to 
its diffusiveness and, consequently, to its dominion, in 
the jealousy and turbulence of that spirit, — just now 
subdued, but " scotched, not killed," — which smoul- 
ders in the body politic: — a restless spirit whose 
element is contention, troubled in its very repose, and 
swiftly, with a fancied right or fancied wrong, making 

" all Europe ring, from side to side." 

Freest of all lands from monster-violences of Faction, 
yet not without her peccadillos is this saucy, sea-girt 
Albion — and could her white cliffs blush, as deep a 
pink as dyes the brier-rose might tinge her ocean- 
aspect in contrition for occasional foibles. But Bri- 
tain now is growing less Babel-like, and, politically 
speaking, we English people are becoming more " of 
one language and of one speech:" for notwithstanding 
that (in perilous identification of the vox populi with 
the vox Dei,) the old and solid carved-work of our 
good ship, " The State," has been threatened by 
utilitarian axe and hammer, the proud bark rears her 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. O 

head again flauntingiyj as conscious of invulnerable 
bulATarks and of skilful pilotage. Be it as 't may, 
ttie manly* Mariner at tlie helm — who believes her 
buoyancy to be a property infinite — will by no means 
risk her stranding ; though the ship's superseded com- 
pany predict foul weather, and say the subsidized sea 
will be found sui'gy in many places and tempestuous. 

" In your modern books for the most part," said 
Coleridge, " the sentences in a page have much the 
same connection with each other that marbles have in 
a bag — they touch without adhering:" in the actual 
perpetration of irrelevancy how just appears the 
observation ! yet art thou, gentle Eeader, forewarned, 
that in these pages many a swerving from strict con- 
nectedness may be expected; and therefore pray we 
that Xature, in thy apportionment of attributes, may 
have endowed thee with a less austere regard for 
" unities" and " oneness" than that developed by 
Mr. Cui'dle, in his profound disquisitions upon the 
essentialities of the legitimate Drama. 

But on a scribe who cannot " wander at his own 
sweet will " without having to travel back again, his 

* For the propriety of this appellative vide the Premiei^'s speeches 
in propounding and defending the Income-Tax Act. 



6 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

errings avenge themselves ; and the spirit of digression 
is certainly of that rebellious class which "no exorcism 
can bind." Hevenonsl Before the word politics 
escaped ns we were adverting to the pinnacle which 
Poetry has serenely maintained in a discordant and 
distracted generation; shedding, from the lofty sum- 
mit on which her seat is fixed, an influence benign, 
pacific, and ennobling, through all the acrimony of 
political and literary contest, — the birth, rise, and fall 
of hydra-headed faction, — and the busy dissemination 
of doctrines, pestilent though ephemeral, and de- 
moralising although delusive. 

Not to detain thee, dear Reader, longer on a 
dubious threshold, I will hint at what may be anti- 
cipated in the following papers. In the early spring 
of the year of grace, forty-one, it was my lot literally 
to stumble on an individual, in whose companionship, 
originating in this contingency. Time seemed to aug- 
ment the velocity of his flight. Age, as I afterwards 
discovered, had dealt leniently with him ; for though 
in close proximity with the grand climacteric, his 
visage was little marred by furrows, and hoar hairs 
have won reverence for many a younger brow. He 
had been an enthusiast in admiration of poetry and 
poets, nay was himself a poet according to the tenets 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 7 

of Miss Mitforcl, — one of the " many that " (says a 
Voice from E-ydal Mount,) " are sown by Nature;" 
and this enthusiastic temperament was still the idio- 
syncrasy of the man. Externally, with one exception, 
his aspect was so unmarked by peculiarity, that in 
the thronged streets of a city the majority would have 
honored him far less than Wordsworth's Wanderer, 
and have passed him without remark. But they, 
who, from accident or audacity, had looked in for a 
few consecutive moments at the lattice-lights of his 
soul_, forgot rudeness in yielding to fascination — so 
incessantly-varying was the expression seen there. 
Yet never in their unrest were they uncomely lights 
to look upon — the revealers never of repulsive pas- 
sions — but, pure as the scintillations of a star, re- 
pudiated all sympathy with the sordidness which 
degrades and the vices which pollute the crowd. 

He was of average stature, and his nether propor- 
tions were arrayed in that old-gentlemanly garb, by 
ancient scriptural translators imputed (in name at 
least) to primitive times, and to the invention of one 
of our first parents — the paternal ancestor, no doubt. 
Supplements in the shape of gaiters, of a dark hue 
to match their antecedents, completed the covering 
of locomotives of no ungraceful structure, and ex- 



8 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

tended over the major part of shoes, well-shaped 
and rather accurately fitted. His upper garment, less 
than any other, betrayed subserviency to the Parisian 
idol; for the placid artist whom he delighted to honor, 
establishing each primal pattern as a precedent abso- 
lute, and " nursed at happy distance" from, or paying 
platonic indifierence to, conflicting Reports of Fashion, 
never tortured his patron's body or kindled ire in his 
flashing eye, by chasing a fugitive comme il faut for 
the more becoming decoration of his person. That 
unreasonable (and, were it not for custom, unseemly) 
item, which, without the recommendation of comfort 
or elegance, humanity has so long chosen, under one 
contour or another, for the conservation of the cranium 
from ungenial elements or casual assaults — that formal 
and vacant product of a block, which Englishmen call 
hat, as it appeared on the personage of whom I speak, 
was in keeping with the ensemble. That part of it 
which the half-gallon measure at a potato-shop most 
strikingly illustrates, was rather low than lofty, and 
would have made a lucrative gauge for the merchant 
if employed in such a dispensation of his wares. Its 
margin was capacious, and, slightly aiding gravity, 
served also to render less evident to first-sight the 
swift vicissitudes of visionary expression to which I 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 9 

have adverted ; but, in further reference to this " pe- 
culiar eye," its keenness of perception (I would aver 
with humility) was not surpassed by the Wanderer's 
in the Excursion. In youth it had been subject to 
short-sightedness; and now, from causes clear, I be- 
lieve, to oculists. Time, so far from clouding, clarified 
its powers. Indeed, the vigor of this faculty in one 
so old was almost incredible ; nor was it until after 
long intercourse that I, who met him oft, was made 
to comprehend the full reach of that tremendous 
organ, and then by an acquisition of intelligence 
more sudden and startling than the stoppage of a 
bank to an American. My friend — for in sooth he 
and I were soon 

'* A pair of friends, though 1 was young 
And he was sixty-two" — 

my friend (I mention it to thee in a whisper, fair 
Eeader,) existed in a state of celibacy, sometimes 
miscalled single blessedness; [a man who knew what 
happiness meant so well as he, lived not designedly 
so, you may be sure — but of the causes, peradventure, 
anon:] and there came occasionally to brighten the 
old Sponsor's abode by her presence, and make it 
more melodious with the sweet outpourings of her 



10 lifTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

solicitude than it was wont to be with poets' voices, 
a Visitant, lovely enough to be ideal, but happily of 
more perdurable material than " dreams are made of." 
With this fair form, when acquaintanceship had duly 
ripened into familiarity, I commenced a kind of tele- 
graphic correspondence — the signals consisting of 
amatory glances and sighs; and confiding too implicitly 
in the denseness of that curtain which Old Age 
lowers, with hasty or gentle hand, on eye and ear, we 
saw in the Ancient's presence no absolute impedi- 
ment to aU communication. — So we continued to 
exchange dispatches, till the conspiracy demanded 
a denouement, and we resolved — she, of course, re- 
luctantly — that " the catastrophe should be a nuptial." 
That only which allied perplexity with passion was 
the unquestioned fact, that Mary's godfather was as 
profoundly in the dark about her leaning " to the 
soft side of the heart," as (if there be truth in tory 
tattle) was wont to be a merry ex-chief-minister, 
touching the movements and projects of his right- 
trusty and well-beloved co-mates in the executive. 

The happiest day of one's life is not invariably ap- 
proached by pleasurable steps. The business of oral 
confession is embarrassing to the most voluble tongue, 
if the tale it tells to the ear mostly concerned be one 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 11 

of truth; but the emharras augmentetli miglitily if 
another avowal be expedient. However^ having to 
leave town for an indefinite space, and reflecting that 
wishes " had not a body in them" to make confession 
by proxy, I racked up my resolution to the highest 
degree of desperation, and with stammered accent and 
in paralytic phrase besought to inform him of — that — 
which — " he had read (if outward signs of things 
within could be read) connectedly, from alpha to 
omega, and of which he flattered his discernment he 
could have given me the earliest information!" 

He was a bachelor, but he loved — the poets and 
his godchild in particular, all mankind in general. 
His conversation, when it turned not on practical 
subjects, was poetic in conception, and often poetic in 
expression, and was enriched and stimulated by an 
exuberancy of quotation. It is some of such that I 
shall endeavour, from crude and hasty notes, to tran- 
scribe. Where there may appear intelligence, the 
praise be his ; where insipidity, the reproach be mine : 
and this must, I fear, frequently occur — for charms 
of voice, impressiveness of gesture, and eloquence of 
eye, are efficient auxiliaries to amj theme — too subtle, 
alas! to be " turned into shape" by any but a " poet's 



12 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

pen;" and even by that inspired instrument, are 
seldom in strict fidelity transfixed on the poet's page. 

It only remains, among preliminaries, to relate how 
I became acquainted with the individual I have very 
imperfectly described; and here a fitting occasion 
presents itself (at least, in my opinion, which I sub- 
mit with deference,) for some elucidation of the first 
person in the singular number in this narration. My 
dramatis personcB are limited, and the expediency of 
personal portraiture will consequently, and perhaps 
fortunately, be unfrequent. Nevertheless, where a 
prolonged intercourse is probable, it is preferable to 
foreknow something of one's camarade; — nay, it is 
desirable, though he be but the convive of a festal 
hour, or the companion in a stage-coach. — In steam- 
carriages such prescience is a matter of indiiference, 
— so is a pleasant prospect and a brawling brook, — 
everything, in short, except the bursting of an engine 
or sepulchral symptoms in a tunneL 

Be it then known unto thee, friendly Eeader, by 
these presents, which come greeting, that the part 
I was to act upon the stage of life (provided I should 
retain an essential principle,) was appointed for me 
ere I had emerged from swaddling-clothes. At what 
precise period in the present century I made my debut 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 13 

in a part which, like the lion's (allotted to Snug*), is 
done " extempore, for it is nothing but roaring," it is 
not pleasant to communicate. A desire to avoid 
divulging the exact antiquity of the chronicle com- 
menced by Time coeval with our birth, is a delicate 
refinement now so generally displayed, that a definite 
reference to the calendar is out of date, and, indeed, 
indicates eccentricity in a writer. The cause may be 
questionable — whether this exquisite sensibility be 
fostered by the increase of infant seminaries sanctioned 
by an enlightened legislature, or by the dififusion of 
liberal arts and sciences, by ultra-liberal hawkers 
promulgated upon the lowest possible terms on the 
mercurial side of nothing — the cause, I repeat, may 
be questionable, but this efifect is undeniable, that an 
antipathy to reveal with precision the passage of Time 
over our heads, is becoming universal as intelligence. 
It seems to be a resolution of the day, that if the 
mighty Hunter's f reckless Whipper-in ivill ride 
rough-shod over this corporeal compound, his deface- 
ments shall not be noisily blazoned but rather sighed 
over secretly. So that (out of life-insurance ofiS.ces) 
the utmost admission made consists of a plaintive 

* Midsummer Night's Dream, iii. 1. 
t " Death, that mighty Hunter!"— Night Thoughts. 

B 2 



14 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

iteration of the Patriarcli's lament — '^ few and evil 
have the days of the years of my life been." 

I borrow from the Prophet the paternal, maternal, 
and grand-maternal decree concerning myself: here 
it is briefly, — " To the lawV^ I grew up in the 
dangerous and isolated position of an only son — not 
dangerous because isolated, but because idolised. I 
always foresee fearingly the fate of an only son — 
shudderingly if there be a grandam in existence. A 
unique ^' pledge," in such a case, is more hapless 
and more to be lamented over than the least-likely 
to be redeemed at a pawnbroker's. To every volition 
of his will there is regard — to every appeal, assent; 
and how can either teeth or temper maintain a purity 
against indulgences, dispensed with freer hand than 
that of Pope of Eome in direst poverty ! Much less 
to be expected then, from such matriculation, is any 
premature penchant for those interesting studies and 
that agreeable discipline adjudged by Lord Eldon to 
be essential to such as hope to live by the law. 

My forensic future was proverbial in my boyhood, 
and numberless were the exhortations to docility and 
studiousness to which it supplied a text. " I heard 
them, but I heeded not." The pedagogue to whose 
training I was entrusted at a later stage, bewailed my 



I^^TRODTJCTORY CHAPTER. \b 

'' mania for wood-walking and vagaries in verse, which 
for the most part were vanity, and would doubtlessly 
end in vexation of spirit;" but was too tender-hearted 
to chastise, and, like Southey's, " never consumed 
birch enough in his vocation to make a besom." How 
strongly some oddities protest against oblivion ! Poor 
M — ! never shall I forget the " anger, insignificantly 
fierce," which, when it distorted thy patient features, 
was certain to defeat its purpose, provoking to risi- 
bility, with difficulty suppressed, the culprit it was 
intended to daunt. Nor ever can I fail to remember 
those quiet bubblings ft'om thy natural fount of hu- 
mour, whose current the cares of a contentious wife 
and seven clamorous bantlings had not sufficed en- 
tirely to dam. 

M — astounded and delighted me a few weeks ago, 
by presenting himself at my chambers. London has 
always a choice collection of comicalities in human 
shape, or claiming a kindred with humanity, and the 
worthy dominie of D — (in the far west) was no mean 
metropolitan marvel during his sojourn in the vast city, 
'' whose streets," quoth he, " are verily interminable, 
presenting a changeless perspective of sooty dwellings, 
dimly visible through an atmosphere of smoke." M. 
was an amateur of lowly pretensions on the violin ; and 



16 INTRODrCTORY CHAPTER. 

in the lull of holiday-freedom he sought in psalmody 
a refuge from connubial reproach, which yielded to 
but one assuaging influence — sleep. M. had a tune 
on the title of which he jested with lugubrious levity 
— There is balm (said he) in Gilead! Conscious of 
his enjoyment of sweet sounds, I insisted on his ac- 
companying me to a concert in Hanover-square; and 
during the plaudits which followed a pathetic aria 
from a female singer, he remarked, with a physiogno- 
mical expression in which humour, ecstasy, and gra- 
vity were strangely mingled, " Of a verity, Mr. C, 
yon syren's was the sweetest melody that, in the 
years of my experience, I ever heard produced by a 
Birch !^'' 

The season of boyhood is certainly as swift of wing 
as the seasons which succeed it — ay, by the light of 
Memory, whose property it is to condense tribulation 
and to dilate joy, it appears scarcely less swift than that 
Spring of the seasons of the soul — its first love. Before 
I was half prepared to relinquish my capacity as 

" a Dreamer among men, 
Indeed an idle Dreamer," 

I was summoned to sterner engagements, in the coil 

of which, narrowing as it did the boundaries of all 

* It was the cantatrice of that name who sung. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 17 

previous pleasures, I syllabled, in con expressione 
monotony, 

" Ah, happy years] who would not be again a boy?" 

Let all on the side male who cannot plead guilt- 
less of this ejaculation, in spirit if not in the very 
letter, come with me hereupon to an arbitrementj 
and as many elegant minds have imbibed many unin- 
telligible fancies ffom *^ The Childe," who, were the 
state of childhood again their own, would not appear 
as hoys, either by creation or by choice, let us em- 
brace the supplicants of both sexes, and determine 
who are they that — were the change optional — would 
antedate their liv^s agreeably to their longings. 

Not the youth who is professing love, nor the 
maiden who is pondering upon marriage. 

The youth might who has gone before the priest, 
and finds himself nearer purgatory than paradise j 
and so might a wife wedded ^' by attorneyship," or 
the mother of a thankless child. 

Not the youth who is advancing to manhood and 
to great possessions — to the freedom of majority and 
the unrestrained right to do as he likes with his own. 

Such a " major" might who has gained discretion 
and lost his domain ; and so might a young man 



18 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

made old by excesses ; so might a saint in an outburst 
of innocency, and a sinner in a paroxysm of despair. 

So migbt he who hath seceded from vice, and is 
troubled at the tears he hath occasioned, or harrowed 
by the heart he may have broken. 

So might he to whom the moral aspect of the time 
is ^^dark as Erebus/' and who is discontented at 
everything. 

But so would not he who knows that progressive 
privileges attend progressive age, and each nobler in 
its order: — that intellectual advancement, founded 
upon holy Truth, is the superworthy aim, congenial 
element, and noblest safeguard of the soul — its fitting 
discipline, in the twilight-hour of its terrestrial so- 
journ, for the cloudless immutable meridian of its 
celestial exaltation. 

It is a work of considerable difficulty — which in- 
creases daily — to keep one's footing on the road to 
Honor, beset as it now is beyond all precedent, by a 
host of aspirants beyond all calculation. It is the 
struggling, hustling, anxious course, on which the 
million compete, and the few unconcernedly regard. 
And of the crowd which enter for the race, how 
few attain the goal — of the countless array of com- 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 19 

petitors^ how scanty are the gifted with the garland ! 
That ramification of the said road which leadeth unto 
legal eminency^ is especially notorious for its tortuosity 
and glorious uncertainty; and many a chancellor and 
chief baron in nocturnal visions (which befriend *), 
has^ in the reality of broad day, found himself still 
helow the bar, and there not seldom unlike the dispu- 
tative angels — " in wandering mazes lost." With all 
my respect for that learned body to which my sire 
supplied an insignificant limb in my unworthy person, 
I did not suddenly burn to be esteemed a Daniel in 
judgment, nor was I sensible of any instantaneous 
exhilaration from inspiring ether oracularly rarified, 
nor was I roused to emulation by the conflict of the 
courts. A simple summary of the subjects with which 
it was necessary to be conversant, convinced me that 
Cromwell had singularly fallen upon truth when he 
said, that, " there being so many law-books of great 
bulk, so many old musty records and reports, as that 
after the time spent in school-learning, the rest of the 
time of the flower of a man's life would be little 
enough to read them over and peruse them." Vigi- 
lantihus non dormientibus suhserviunt leges, should be 

* " Night visions may befriend, 

Our waking dreams are fatal." — Night Thoughts. 



20 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

an aphorism in as constant repetition with a student, 
as his ^^ Ave'^ with the suppliant of a certain creed. 
No doubt the truism is distressing, but it is salutary. 
If, thought 1, I devote myself to this " sage and 
serious doctrine," it must be at the sacrifice of pur- 
suits infinitely more pleasurable, though certainly less 
profitable, if estimated by the Hudibrastic standard — 

" What is the worth of any thing 
But so much money as 'twill bring ?" 

Then, too, I had scruples, suggested by admiration 
of Consistency and reverence of Truth, which, per- 
haps, but for lofty prototypes in punctilio, I might 
have coyly concealed. To lie like truth, — to imitate 
in one particular a celebrated parliamentary refugee, 

" Hazer lo bianco negro, y lo negro bianco," — 

and with the consciousness of crime to assume and 
argue as for innocency, were hard to be reconciled 
with preconceived notions of the sanctity of Right, 
or made conformable to a moral creed, of which it 
was a primary article that " The simple energy of 
Truth needs no ambiguous interpretation." Yet if 
such reasons could prevail upon the noble and high- 
minded father of Hale, with so much force as to 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 21 

induce him to retire from the practice of his profession, 
to what can we look for a more effective confutation 
of their right to prevail, than to the character of his 
illustrious son? — in the contemplation of which I 
derived a quietus for this order of compunctious 
visitings. 

My countenance was not always " sicklied o'er with 
the pale cast of" parchment which it now wears, and 
on the eve of my entry at Lincoln's-inn, I cogitated 
on a subject of mutual concern with myself and grand- 
mother (not Blackstone). I had still sympathy enough 
with rustic vulgarity to look lovingly on a visage 
whose ruddy tinge betokened a connexion with the 
heart, — a connexion, the existence of which in law- 
yers is sometimes disputed by the profane, on other 
grounds than that of a bloodless physiognomy. It 
was grievous to think that ere long I might as 
strikingly resemble " a thing that ne'er had life" 
as did respectively H — and B — and P — , whose 
ghostly apparitions flitted before me, like weird 
and warning monitors, their livid features dilating 
in awful elongation, till the sphere proper to the mas- 
ticatory process appeared in each like an emporium 
of ivory tusks. And these, not long since, had been 
" sweet-faced men as one shall see in a summer's day;" 



23 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

and, fitted once to personate Pyramus, could hence- 
forth be counted as stars — perhaps only as satellites — 
in the Apothecary line for ever ! But the " venerable 
Maid" has no more regard for the pride of the 
physical constitution, than Miss Mary- Ann Walker 
for the pride of the political ; and 

" The visage wan, the purblind sight," 

are phases and signs which the prejudices of the 
multitude obstinately identify with ability. I re- 
member once on the circuit leaving the court-house or 
hall at Salisbury, on the heels of smiling Mr. M— ; 
and as he turned a corner, while I remained at the 
window of a book-shop, I overheard a countryman 
say to his companion, alluding to the comely barrister, 
" Now, if I did want a laayer, I wouldna choose he; 
— he he a dale too fat and pleasant-looking for a 
laayer P'' 

Enfin, (dissyllabic darling of our neighbours, help 
me to an end!) enji7i, I became that which I am. 
Blackstone, in his " Farewell to the Muse," enume- 
rates a train of penalties, contingent with the fervent 
embrace of ^'^ fair Justice," which are penalties although 
poetically clothed, as pills made palatable with sweet- 
meat are still physic. But, comprehensive as is his 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 2S 

catalogue of contingent ills, there is a reinaiiider un- 
mentioned, before which, all recited evils " hide their 
diminished heads :" can the briefless need a reminder 
that their condition is not included in his detail 
of professional calamities? But the sanguine tem- 
perament of youth is not prone to anticipate chagrin 
or privation, and dwells more interestedly on arenas 
of legal contention — anticipates the applausing hum 
of courts, the murmured homage to eloquence — fore- 
fancies championship and conquest; and preconceives 
the florid invocation, resistless argument, and eloquent 
propitiation of a decree, on which are suspended the 
absorbing interests of Life, and Fame, and Honor ; — 
and speeds, by an ideal path, to renown, preferment, 
ease. Soon, on the stoicism of adolescence, ambition 
works; and soon I looked at this, the bright side of 
the scene. Hume (the historian) estimates a natural 
disposition to view things on the sunny side, as more 
than equivalent to a fortune of £10,000 a year. — A 
living economist might think the calculation hasty, 
and feel disposed to cavil at so large a " tottle." In 
embracing law I had, moreover, home anticipations — 
not to realise, for they were Utopian, but to cherish, 
for they were fond. Advising, after twelve months 
application, with a visitor at the paternal residence. 



24 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

on a plain principle^ a copious (and superfluous) use 
of teclinicalities convinced my father that my time 
had been well spent, and threw around me the halo 
of an oracle in the dim eyes of a venerable maternal 
ancestor, who would " die happily could she live to see 
me a judge" — her ne plus ultra of forensic dignity. 
Dear old Lady ! without this anodyne her " sleep of 
death" was peaceful as a pleasant dream, and little 
recked she of the superadded " labor and sorrow" 
that must have been entailed on her by the fruition 
of her wish. For my own part, my aspirations are 
less presumptions ; and a silk gown, which never would 
have occurred to her as a desideratum with men, 
would appease my longings and be gratefully ac- 
knowledged. 

Prolixity, Reader ! is, as thou mayest haply know, 
peculiar to the Law and its disciples; and if herein 
I stand accused of circumlocution, would that I could 
truly interpret to thee that encouragement to expatiate 
which now I feel, in assured freedom from the frowns 
of impatient jurymen, ungifted with eye or ear to 
comprehend the subtleties of the statute-book, and 
willing to cut off Magna Charta from their children, 
so they — sires of the spirit of Esau — might 'scape 
judicial durance vile, devour their pottage at-home, 
and rejoin their aprons. 



INTKODUCTORY CHAPTER. 25 

On an April morning in 41, I was proceeding to 

my chambers in . I had been engaged during 

the greater part of the night in a complicated inves- 
tigation, and having arrived at an opinion which I 
considered to be as well-grounded as it would be 
satisfactory to my client, I was disembarrassed of care, 
and my spirit seemed gifted with the volatility of 
an angel's wing. " Town-imprisoned," as gentle 
Mary terms it (William Howitt's Mary, not mine), 
town-imprisoned, we taste but a dilution of the joy- 
enkindling elixir which Delight, prime almoner to the 
Queen of seasons, pours lavishly by wood, and field, 
and stream, in the golden light of an April morn. 
Yet, weakened as becomes the pure effluence by com- 
mixture with the murky atmosphere of busy haunts, 
it still retains ingredients which inspire with a joyous 
consciousness of the time; and even in the clamour 
of a city the heart recognises and leaps lithely at the 
voice of Spring. For stony limits may sooner shut 
out Love* than exclude Nature; and when the all- 
animating Spring passes over creation, with her vivi- 
fying breath making the old world young again, her 
influence operates in man like a renewal of God's 

* " With Love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls, 

. For stony limits cannot hold Love out." — Romeo and Juliet. 



26 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

breath of life ; and the indefinable exultation which 
rises in his bosom attests but his participation in the 
instinctive and insuppressible sympathy which all 
things living own for youth — the doctrine of whose 
infinite prolongation in a happier sphere lends the tint 
of transport to fabled felicity, and gilds the pinions of 
a surer and sublimer Hope. Eternal youth I What 
other epoch of existence can imagination appropriate 
to the glad heritage of bliss? Not the dawn of 
capacity, or its decline ; not immaturity or imbecility 
— but the ever-ripening, ever-rosy Morn; — Morn 
which prevails in perpetuity, and which cannot 
hasten Noon, for Noon is Night's precursor, and 
Night may not spread her sable mantle over the 
Eealm of the Eejoicing! 

On the morning to which I have adverted, I had 
resigned myself to the Spirit of the Air, — 

" The pleasant season did my heart employ; 
My old remembrances went from me wholly, 
And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy." 

Who has not smiled at his own locomotive irregula- 
rities, when governed by the impulses of an ecstasy 
to which all temporal care is alien, and inspired with 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 27 

which the human heart yearns, from its most hallowed 
depths, with the boundless desire to bless? — 

** To me that morning did it happen so;" 

and having, in changing mood and by changing mo- 
tion, nearly attained my destination, I had lingered 
in loving dalliance before the attractive exposition of 
a bibliopolist — one of those tempting arrays of title- 
pages, which to this day (unless urged onwards by a 
professional pressure from without,) detain me with 
the virtue of an arrest. There were treatises, by 
master-minds, on the Religion which reconciles the 
contradictions and irradiates the oft-beclouded per- 
spective of life ; on the pharmaceutic Science, by which 
purchasers might secure an immortality igi has ; and 
on Law, by which its mysteries were simplified to the 
scale of Readings made Easy. And, above these, a 
rank of Poets, living and dead — if indeed true Poets 
can die — cherished titles all, the humblest of which by 
mere articulation sounds a chord that kindles rapture. 
There were — but what need to recapitulate names 
" familiar as household words?" Last of all stood 
Burns; and, swift as thought, the rapture within me 
found utterance in jocund words of song: — 



2S INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

" O Life ! how pleasant in thy morning, 
Young Fancy's rays the hills adorning ! 
Cauld-pausing Caution's lessons scorning, 

We frisk away, 
Like school-boys at th' expected warning, 

To joy and play!" 

Then, lest I might be longer beguiled by that ^' sweet 
companie/' I receded hastily, and in -unconscious 
vicinity with the Old Man too long lost sight of in 
these pages, who had been standing behind me, I 
came into a collision with him so violent and unex- 
pected, that for a moment I was a painful witness of 
a critical experiment on the laws of gravitation. 

Of course I was instantly earnest in apology, which 
was not, he benignantly assured me, needed. There 
are symbols out of Masonry which attest fraternity 
of feeling, and a disposition towards attachment was 
suddenly and reciprocally developed by us two. The 
passion of Celia and Oliver, who " no sooner looked 
than they loved,"* was not quicklier conceived than 
our friendship. He had heard my quotation from the 
Scottish bard, (which I had vented audibly, believing 
myself alone,) and though tolerably well-stricken in 
years, he appeared to appreciate the ecstatic pride 
* As You Like it. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 29 

of life to which the poet has supplied a language. 
"We conversed awhile and parted, for recollections of 
waiting clients gat hold upon me : but we exchanged 
addresses ; and when — in reply to his earnest solicita- 
tion that I would visit him soon, ve^ry soon, I promised 
on the evening of the second day to call on him at 
Ivy Lodge, it was with a strong confidence that I 
should find it -a " haven where I would be." 



« 2 



COLLOQUY L 



THE OLD ENTHUSIAST'S SHELL, WITH A SAMPLE OF ITS 
ECHOES. 



COLLOQUY I. 



CHAPTER II. 

" Whate'er you see, whate'er you feel, display 
The Realm you sought for." — Parnell. 

The habitation of the individual with, whom I had 
thus become acquainted, and for whom I was sensible 
of a sudden and singular interest, was situate in one 
of the pleasantest environs of London. The day was 
in a deep decline at the period of my presentment, 
but yielded still abundant light about the Lodge to 
display the neatness of its external aspect, which, as 
well as the arrangement of a limited parterre, bespoke 
its owner's sense of chasteness and propriety. The 
house was in its character more rural than, in that 
neighbourhood, suburban dwellings are in general; 
and whilst its size and situation might have adapted 



34 CHAPTER II. 

it for the retreat of a merchant, the absence of certam 
features pleasant to the eyes of a commergant, con- 
vinced you that it was not the harbour of a merchant- 
man, or that if it was, its appearance guaranteed his 
good taste and true gentility. [I protest, en passant, 
against any illiberal deduction from this remark, 
which merely implicates ^ozi^, not worth: — I rejoice 
over several clients in the commercial interest — all 
honorable men, very.] The entrance-gate opened by 
a peculiar catch, and formed part of a wooden fencing 
of lattice-work, which, being high and over-run with 
ivy, concealed from pedestrian passers-by the lower 
rooms of the Lodge. The house also was nearly 
covered with the same vagrant root, displaying two 
distinct hues — that which grew upon the projections 
of the building being of a deeper green than that 
which overspread its recesses. A few vases and 
rustic flower-stands were dispersed in judicious dis- 
play, and were garlanded with the snowdrop and 
primrose. And opposite the housedoor, and com- 
manding obliquely the outer gate, a roomy kennel 
(also over-run with ivy) was established, from which 
there partially protruded the caput of a mastiff, " life- 
like and awful to view," though merely carved and 
colored (as you discovered on a closer and keener 



COLLOQUY I. S5 

scrutiny), and representing the sentinel as keeping 
a vigilant eye upon the wicket, although in couchant 
attitude. 

The public thoroughfare to which the domicile was 
contiguous, was not the most-frequented route to the 
metropolis, though sufficiently peopled; yet, from the 
height and density of the fence that bounded it, 
the gate was no sooner closed on the inside, than you 
seemed in a realm sacred to Silence — in a sanctuary 
upon whose stillness there intruded only the fitful 
note of some drowsy wood-warbler, nestling down 
for the night, — very languidly carolled, but not on 
that account the less heart-soothing, 

" as it sank 
On the lull'd ear, its melody that drank." 

And many a weary wing had its quiet resting-place 
there — not more secure in leafy solitudes than in the 
depths of that redundant ivy and the guardianship of 
the kind heart it sheltered. The stillness that reigned 
without the Lodge presided more intensely within — 
a realisation of Peace made palpable — Quietness (like 
Darkness once in Egypt) that might be felt. Win- 
dows, some partially and others wholly composed of 
amber-colored glass, imparted to the interior a dim, 



o6 CHAPTEK II. 

religious light, of that chastened hue, neither silvery 
nor golden purely, but a rich commingling of both — 
such, fair Lady, as your own starry orbs may have 
witnessed in the west at eventide, ere the Day's 
lustrous orb had suffused the horizon with the deep 
crimson radiance which consummates his setting. 
There is a peculiarly-tranquillising influence in that 
soft amber light; and perhaps from associating it with 
the quietude that prevails at sunset, or with the 
solemn splendour which it sheds over sacred places, 
we connect it instinctively with serenity. The apart- 
ment in which I found the genius loci, had an air 
of luxurious comfort, utterly apart from ostentation; 
the walls supported the effigies of six generations 
of his fathers; and though the room was not large, 
the chief portion of the space left unoccupied by his 
ancestors was devoted to the accommodation of four 
capacious bird-cages, " the lodging" (as he observed 
smilingly, the instant he perceived my eye upon them,) 
" the lodging of a few parlour-boarders, in addition 
to a numerous singing-class in the eaves and leaves 
without. — I feel," he continued, in reply to a remark 
I made connected with his in-door aviary, " I feel, if 
not a sacred, an ' home-felt delight,' in the strains of 
my domestic quire, which, by-the-bye, the last few 



COLLOQUY I. 37 

days of warmth and sunshine have driven to such 
excess of riot, as made them almost 

' vex with mirth the drowsy ear of Night:' 

but my joy was well-nigh at an end, and my band in 
danger of being broken-up, by a doctrine of humanitij 
taught with the power of poesy by that dear Disturber 
in the North, the undying Christopher of that 
name, for whom I will not impute to you the bar- 
barism of a want of love and reverence. He denomi- 
nates the singing of caged birds ^ a rueful simulation 
of music ;' and ^ upon this hint I spake,' though loth, 
a sentence of emancipation in favor of that unconscious 
captive roosting on the upper perch there, (still wide 
awake, joer Hercule! J my feathered knight. Sir Fre- 
deric — to whom esteem yourself as introduced. My 
servant is infected with his master's prejudices, and 
did the part of Liberator as lazily as would a more 
reputed son of Fame, were his liberating efforts hono- 
rary. And indeed my newly-born humanity was nearly 
convulsed at the bird's embrace of Liberty, whom I had 
not heart to hail then as ' the merry mountain-nymph f 
for, independently of the favoritism induced by long 
companionship, I had gloomy forebodings of a compul- 
sory indolence and disenchanted solitude, if the ^ fytte* 



38 CHAPTER II. 

caught from the Recreations of Christopher should 
have four days' continuance. What matinal employ- 
ment could I invent, as a substitute for the duty of 
preparing sustenance for those devourers? That 
same blithe bigot. Sir Fred, turns sullen and threatens 
felo de se by starvation if any other hand than mine 
presumes to meddle with his provision; and the 
Queen Dowager — near my honored grandsire's por- 
trait — even she does despite to a hallowed Name, by 
signs of unamiable temper, if other than I prepare 
her royal board. But away — -after long pausing and 
beginning late — away went Sir Frederic on his ^ ad- 
vent'rous flight,' to a shrub five yards distant from his 
prison-house, whence, after a perplexing reconnoitre, 
he adjourned to the ivy above the window here. We 
saw no more of the knight till morning, and then he 
was discovered en attendant on the window-ledge, in 
a frame of feathers 

' That, in the various bustle of resort, 
Were all too ruffled and somewhat impaired.' 

A luckless boon was freedom to Sir Fred ! The co- 
lonists on the outside — an envious Ishmaelitish 
mobocracy! — did most despitefuUy entreat and per- 
secute the yellow-crested knight. But yet — (you 



COLLOQUY I. 39 

remember the philosophic chant of the Swan of 
Avon) — 

* There is some soul of goodness in things evil ;' 

and the maladventnres of my marred and maimed 
minstrel over-ruled the ultra-liberalism of the North ; 
enabled me with quiet conscience to retain my house- 
hold company of melodists; and did assuredly qualify 
me, by patient watchings and successful healing, 
for a physician's diploma in ornithological pharmacy. 
— Really I am bound to apologise for permitting a 
mere canary-bird thus early and, perhaps, indeco- 
rously to incite me to garrulity. But I have a 
secret faith that I may, with you, assume the freedom 
of a more prolonged intimacy. Read you ever the 
Poet-Preacher (Taylor)'s Sermon on the Marriage- 
Ring? — No! — Then, abstain from it if you would 
avoid the state of wedlock! ^ No man,' says that 
divine Divine, '■ can tell, but he that loves his children, 
how many delicious accents make a man's heart to 
dance, in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges. 
Their childishness, their little angers, their innocence, 
their imperfections, fheir necessities, are so many 
little emanations of joy and comfort to him that de- 
lights in their persons and society.' Now I am a 



40 CHAPTER II. 

doating old man, unwedded, and the "birds yon see 
around me are some of my fondlings — my adopted 
children^ 

A tone of voice, soft, and touched with the gentlest 
trill, (not dissimilar to that which, about nine years 
ago, distinguished the Bishop of Winchester's,) and 
the peculiar visual expression I have mentioned, gave 
wondrous effect in speech to what may appear tame in 
transcript. His eyel — it was nearly tantamount to 
another tongue, — the mind's interpreter by an optical 
language. And his voice, though not naturally pow- 
erful, was capable of inflexions so nice and gifted with 
intonations so musical, that, together, he spake and 
looked an expiring subject into vivid life again: and, 
making every object he alluded to, live in description, 
there breathed from him, as he pleaded his concern 
for his feathered family, such ineffable fondness, that 
in the prarity of his affection you admired it the more 
for its simplicity, and felt the effect of its eloquence 
to be a new estimation of canaries. 

The sanctum in which he was seated, was sur- 
rounded with book-shelves, fitted under, and forming 
an additional support to, his progenitors on the canvas. 
On one side of the apartment were arranged the 
works of prose authors, the back of each serving as 



COLLOQUY I. 41 

a remembrancer of reputation, either time-honored or 
cotemporary : and the opposite compartment was filled 
with the works of poets, chiefly British. A volume 
of the Faery Queene, another of Eacine, Chalmers' 
Tron Church Sermons, and Les Oraisons Funebres de 
Bossuet, were lying on the table. We discoursed for 
a brief space upon current topics, and the circum- 
stance of our rencontre. He told me of his peculi- 
arities of taste and sentiment, ^' which are not either 
peculiarities, I trust," said he, in summing them up, 
" since my best hope is in Religion, my warmest aspi- 
ration for my fellows' good, and my chief pleasure 
ill Poetry — which is to Nature (which is all, save 
God !) as the handmaid of a lovely regal maiden, who 
indicates, and calls upon you to admire, the charms 
of her sovereign mistress." 

I availed myself of a momentary cessation to glance 
at the books before him. " To use a phrase familiar 
to you," said he, " I have been turning to each of these 
works for a refresher. My memory, which I kept 
tolerably ^ schooled and exercised ' in youth, plays the 
truant 'in mine age, now I am gray-headed;' and, 
faithful from period to period, has not fidelity which 
can abide a paragraph. A lady of my acq^uaintance 
has made my cottage eloquent to-day with the praises 



42 CHAPTER II. 

of Mile. Eachel: her name recalled the Hermione 
of E-acine's Andromaque, whom I heard and saw at the 
Theatre Francais. The Englishman's World-painter, 
glorious Will himself, and in his own language, often 
dwindles into doggrel in attempting to jingle; but 
the French tragedial rhyme is intolerable. What 
sympathy can one feel for sentiment, that should move 
with the majesty and ease of a monarch, stalking on 
stilts, and rescued from a monotonous twang only 
by manifest effort?" 

C. — Little, indeed; though the first-class artistes 
avoid with much dexterity the gulf which yawns at 
the close of each couplet! This difficulty and, to 
us, defect, displays in full-relief the scarecrow which 
Milton designates ' the troublesome and modern 
bondage of rhyming.' 

£J. — True. You have seen Rachel then? 

C. — I have, but not as Hermione. 

K — She is the reigning deesse with our fickle 
friends, whose fashion it is intensely to idolise, or 
to dispatch, unaneled, au diahle. Each line here 
suggests Poetry in a palsy, and occupies nearly as 
long in reading, as the birth, progression, and decay 
of an affaire du coeur — an amour eternel in the Centre 
of Civilisation. Nevertheless, here are lines which 



COLLOQrY I. 48 

seem to rise from the page with the 'nerve of a 
giant refreshed. Where shall we alight upon a 
scene of conflict more fiery and impetuous than this, 
where every little word on the tongue of a French 
girl becomes a stiletto ! — 

" Ne vous suffit-il pas que je I'ai condanine? 
Qiieje le hais; enfin, seigneur, queje Vaimai."' 

Sorry justification enough for requiring Orestes to 
add to his character of miserable that of murderer ; 
but K-achel, once seen hurling this passion-poisoned 
shaft, in fitful vengeance, at her unhappy suitor — 
he sighing like furnace — can never be forgotten. It 
is indelible as the recollection of a lightning-flash 
which in youth may have blasted a human creature 
on your right-hand, and swept by you scatheless — 
horrified but unhurt. I have never before recog- 
nised so forcibly as now I do, in this reminiscence, 
the strength of this sentence of Madame de Stael :* — 
" Tant (Tindividus traversent V existence, sans se douter 
des passions et de leur force, que souvent le theatre 
revele Vhomme a Vhomme, et lui inspire une sainte 
terreur des or ages de Vame.^'' 

C. — An axiom whose base, alas ! appears to be un- 
* Sur " La Declamation." 



44 CHAPTER II. 

settling ! But you have, there, French eloquence of 
another order — a style which, partial as I am to poetry 
in my proper tongue, claims pre-eminent admiration 
in the Gallic. What an avalanche of the elements 
of oratory, what facile flow of language, what graphic 
delineation, what sonorous adjective-aid, what mel- 
lifluous cadence, conspire, in presence of a lofty am- 
bassador in things divine, to sink (pour le moment) 
the terrestrial; to make " the merry-hearted sigh;" 
and to win, from fair aspirants after bliss, the homage 
of a fervent *^ C^etait magnifiqueV^ on their return 
from the mass to attire for the masquerade! 

M, — Ay, the preacher's end and aim, conviction, 
is, I fear, a fruit rarely found in profusion ; yet, as it 
regards the discoiirs, many an epic poem has been 
pronounced from a French pulpit. That which Cole- 
ridge is reported to have said of Taylor, that he 
seldom wrote prosaically excepting in rhyme, applies 
antithetically with equal justice to the more intel- 
lectual of the priesthood of France — their sermons are 
Poetry, dismounted from the stalking-horse on which 
it paces the stage. Here, for instance, in Bossuet's 
Oraison Funebre de la Reine de la Grande-Bretagne, 
is an exordium of grandeur, worthy to be admired of 
all men, and to sink into the hearts of princes : " Celtd 



COLLOQUY I. 45 

qxd r^gne dans les deux, et de qui relhent totis les 
empires, d qui seul appartient la gloire, la majesU et 
V independence, est aussi le seul qui se glorifie de fairs 
la hi aux rois, et de leur do7ine)% quand il lui plait, de 
grandes et de terribles legons'^ And this " solemn 
opening" precedes no " insignificant conclusion;" his 
theme is at all points arrayed as befits its majesty, 
and merits CoUins's quaternity of epithets — 

" Warm, energic, chaste, sublime.*' 

If an old man's company should induce you often 
hither, we will scan more intently the legacy of this 
holy Priest — and of others — of mighty Massillon! 
Strange sovereignty of a Name, whose sound arouses 
the soul's feelings from a long and deep repose, sud- 
denly as a tired host might start from slumber at the 
thrilling note of peril! Memory, at the name of 
Massillon, unrols a picture wrought in colors weird 
as the gate of Death — in lines wildly terrible as the 
vision of Belshazzar's Feast, or, more fearful still, the 
Deluge, with its multitude — in all the horror of mad- 
ness but without its unconsciousness — urging their 
gasping flight from the gorge of the on-rolling, in- 
exorable wave. He portrays, as present, the end; 
and the dense assembly, with its many phases of cha- 

D 2 



46 CHAPTEK II. 

racter, are bowed, as might have been one contrite 
Sodomite of old, conscious of his city's coming doom, 
and adding his importunity to that marvellous human 
Plea which strove with the Wrath of God. But hear 
the Predicateur: — " Je suppose que ce soit ici notre 
derniere heure a tous: que les cieux vont s'ouvrir 
sur nos tetes ; que le temps est passe et que Feternite 
commence; que Jesus Christ va paraitre pour nous 
juger selon nos oeuvres, et que nous sommes tous ici 
pour attendre de lui I'arret de la vie ou de la mort 
eternelle! Je vous le demande — frapp^ de terreur 
comme vous, ne separant point mon sort du votre, et 
me mettant dans la meme situation ou nous devons 
tous paraitre un jour dcvant Dieu notre Juge; — si 
Jesus Christ, dis-je, paraissait des a present pour 
faire la terrible separation des justes et des pecheurs, 
croyez-vous que le plus grand nombre fut sauve? 
Croyez-vous que le nombre des justes fut au moins 
egal a celui des pecheurs? Croyez-vous que, s'il 
fesait maintenant la discussion des oeuvres du grand 
nombre qui est dans cette eglise, il trouvat seulement 
dix justes parmi nous? — En trouverat-il un seul?^^ 
They tell us that his words ran like a chilly winter- 
stream through his hearers' veins ; and even when 
you read them you feel an involuntary shudder, and 



COLLOQUY I. 47 

almost seem to fluctuate on the brink of that dread 
abyss, over whose despair etherial Hope for a moment 
folds her wings. And yet this Massillon, whose 
every stroke in this picture of awe serves, but sus- 
pends, the climax, till the concentration of all ima- 
ginable calamity is before you ; — this Massillon, who 
seizes upon and sways the mind like a despot, and 
urges it through gradations of increasing tumult into 
a mental Reign of Terror ; — this strife-creating Spirit 
has a voice placid as the smile of Peace — a power to 
dissipate the dark clouds which he has made to lower 
over a near and drear Futurity; to curtain-up that 
chasm of Despair whose influence worked like palsy 
on the wing of Hope ; and by vivid colorings of the 
heritage still accessible to the faithful, to re-invigorate 
the daunted pinion, till it speeds exultingiy and of right 
to an altitude above the stars. Through the lurid 
haze of Awe you pass on to the bright heaven of Per- 
fect Love; and see again your lost birthright of 
beatitude, ditidifeel your property in the Infinite. 

C. — The forte of French preachers, as far as I 
have observed, consists mainly in description and in 
declamation; and the predominancy of the latter may 
perhaps account for the unsatisfying results of theii" 
ministry : the Voice that should penetrate the heart. 



48 CHAPTER II. 

too often plays but on the ear as a pleasant cymbal. 
I shrink from the presumption of giving judgment 
on the French as a people; but La Gaite is their 
Diana, and they have not resolution to abstract them- 
selves from the worship of the idol, and to sit down 
in silent solitude, and be thoughtful. How great a 
contrast to the general style of the French divines is 
presented by the Scottish Chalmers, who — descrip- 
tive in an eminent degree — is irresistible in argument. 
E. — Perhaps by Southrons the eloquent Scot is 
better read than heard. But he arrests the proud 
host of Prejudice, which are apt to rise now in man 
as they have ever risen since the Great Rebellion in 
the year of the world 1, — they recede, I say, before 
this Legate of Truth, like the waves of an ebbing 
tide. Would you enter the lists of controversy with 
him, you are sensible of the impotency of a stripling, 
in the iron grasp of a gladiator. Demonstration is the 
term he chooses for his theological motto, and he has 
a right to it. Eead at your leisure (if it is a sermon 
yet unread,) this seventh of the Tron Church dis- 
courses, and if you discover a loop-hole, admitting 
the escape of any single character from the respon- 
sibility of a searching self-investigation, then I will 
consider your ingenuity stimulated by aid obnoxiously 



COLLOQUY I. 49 

superhuman. On the arguments of Chalmers, as on 
a broad and buoyant tide, Truth stems contending 
elements triumphantly as did the Ark the inundating 
waters. Hear an old divine analogising thereupon: 
'^ When the waters of the flood came upon the face 
of the earth, down went stately turrets and towers. 
In like sort, when the waters of affliction arise, down 
go the pride of life, the lust of the eyes, in a word, 
all the vanities of the world. But the ark of the soul 
riseth as these waters rise, and how too? even nearer 
and nearer unto heaven."* Those old men speak, do 
they not? with admirable simplicity, and shape out a 
moving picture almost in monosyllables. Is the 
primitive mantle rejected from Dan even unto Beer- 
sheba? — is the spirit of the fathers' style " interred 
with their bones?" 

C. — Ah ! the moan, not unmelodious, of discontent 
with things present, the sigh for past perfections, 
echoed from the Poet there ; not captiously, but with 
the tone of complaint natural to moralists with whom 

" was rapture once what is but memory now." 

E. — Complaint! and caught from Edmund Spenser ! 
At what infectious spot? 

* Disce Mori. Sutton, 



50 CHAPTER II. 

C. — From this most " musical and melancholy 
chime," it may be — 

'* So oft as I with state of present time 
The image of the antique world compare, 
Whenas man's age was in his freshest prime, 
And the first blossom of faire vertue bare — 
Such oddes I find 'twixt those, and these which are, 
As that, through long continuance of his course, 
Meseemes the world is run quite out of square 
From the first point of his appointed sourse ; 
And being once amisse grows daily wourse and wourse." 

E. — Upbraid not the Poet for repining at the ills 
of eld — for " grief, which is but grandeur in disguise" 
— for such, and only such degree of discontent with 
Earth, as stirs him to the lofty enterprise of a New 
World: a sphere whose lustrous outline the piercing 
eye of the Poet — by Piety directed — may have traced, 
obscurely perhaps, but with sufficient distinctness to 
animate his hope of inheritancy, and sanctify with 
pure religious fervor his longing for 

*' that same time when no more change shall be, 
But steadfast reste of all things, firmly stayd 
Upon the pillars of Eternitie, 
Which is contraire to mutabilitie : 
For all that moveth doth in change delight, 
But thenceforth all shall reste eternallie 
With him that is the God of Sabaoth highte. — 
O that great Sabaoth God, grant me that sabbath's sighte!" 



COLLOQUY I. 51 

C. — Impressive as Luther's Hymn, heard in 
Westminster Abbey! 

E. — Nay, Poetry, of however sublime a birth, 
can never be so effective alone as when wedded to 
Music, and then in the celestial alliance Poetry is the 
weaker vessel. For among all the instruments to our 
delight, there is not one so potent (during its fugitive 
control) or so mysterious as Music. The hind, moulded 
from the clod and almost as senseless, acknowledges 
its irresistible might, as it undulates on his drowsy 
ear, rousing, and charming, and holding captive; — 
while on finer-fibred spirits does it not operate like a | 
breaking-up within the bosom of " the fountains of the 
great deep !" But its mystery is a nobler and an en- 
nobling theme — a theme which is not of the earth, 
earthy, but which has to do with the imagination, 
detaching its wing from a low brooding over material 
things, and urging it to soar into that vast Eealm of 
Anticipation, to which, as the heirs of infinite promise 
and the creatures of infinite hope, we have hereditary 
right. And making us to marvel, that if such vivi- 
fying influence belongs to the concord of human 
creation, what ecstasy shall be ours amid the minstrelsy 
divine — sounding from the harps of angels, in spheres 
whose secret preparations for his bliss the ear of man 
hath not heard nor can hear ! 



52 CHAPTER II. 

E. was so borne away by the impetuosity of feeling 
excited by his subject, in which his whole being ap- 
peared to be absorbed, that, as he came to a close, his 
faculty of enunciation was impeded, and he rested 
his head upon his hand for a minute. The efferves- 
cence had worked away during that interval, and he 
resumed, — his countenance the visible seat of gentle- 
heartedness, and his voice " soft as the west wind's 
sigh."— 

" Though I spake with the tongues of men and 
angels," I should fail to depict faithfully the dominion 
which this celestial Captivator possesses over me. 
And attributing to it as I do — not the powers of tra- 
ditionary miracle, but yet a mighty power to modify 
the harshness of humanity, and cause many a tract in 
the waste wilderness to blossom as the rose, — I pant 
for the promulgation from high quarters of a well- 
advised system of instruction. Next to Holy Truth 
itself, which the Spanish proverb majestically desig- 
nates as the Daughter of God — 

** La verdad es hija de Dios" — 

next to Truth, I venerate its shrine — next to the 
priceless Pearl, I am anxious for the Ark which bears 
it through the troublous sea of Time : and with the 



COLLOQUY I. 53 

impression I have of the ameliorating, spiritualising 
influence of an extension of the empire of Music, 
I would that the solemnly-affianced sons of the Mother 
of my Faith — the English Church — were energetic 
in its promotion. Her temples do not yet resound 
with holy song — the vernacular language of Gratitude, 
and the temperature of the frigid zone prevails at 
the gate of heaven. For in praise it is that the 
mighty power of harmony subserves its most majestic 
purpose: — attuned in homage of Him before whom 
so many worlds move in order and ^' give out music 
as they go," it is but the reverberation, as it were, of 
the inaudible but not invisible concord that pervades 
the universe; the sacrifice of accordant sound to its 
refulgent Soul and Source ! 

C. — The poet Wordsworth, referring to the sud- 
den and spreading rise of new churches, describes 
the time as conscious of its ivant. In regard to the 
energy, the absence or paralysation of which in our 
services you bewail, this consciousness of a privilege, 
in many places inadequately appreciated, and in some 
(excepting in form) passed into desuetude, approves 
itself to be reviving, and in the symptoms of resusci- 
tation which it exhibits, gives us grateful 

" help, when we woAild weave 
A crown for Hope." 



54 CHAPTER II. 

E. — The weddlng-cliime for an only child could 
not more sadden me in its first effect or more gladden 
me in its second, than that past stifling and present 
unshackling of the spirit of reverential song. And 
depend on it our Church Avill experience a mighty 
strengthening of her sinews in nourishing this breath 
1 of song. For her symmetry and fair proportions, 
\ " long concealed, concealed and cherished long," are 
I developing largely now before children capable of the 
I only invulnerable allegiance — an intelligent one. Day 
by day our Fathers' Faith has fewer champions on the 
sole score of its having been the Faith of our Fathers 
— though that challenge hath a magic charm over 
many hearts; — but daily are augmenting its puissant 
defenders, whose consciences have weighed its tenets 
and found them not wanting. And thus the attach- 
ment of our time is combining the deep veneration 
of the soul with the warm affection of the heart. — 
You have alluded to the " joyful haste" with which 
ascending spires and the sound of " the church-going 
bell" are gladdening the land, fertilising its length 
and breadth. 'Tis the sovereign'st characteristic of 
the age ! The Proposer of Fifty new Churches in a 
single city, will need no elaborate epitaph to invite 
the praises of posterity. 



COLLOQUY I. 00 

The timepiece sounded reproyiugly, and I arose to 
leave, taking a slight liberty with Spenser— 

" Ere long the northerne wagg-oner will set 
His sevenfold teame behind the stedfast starre." 

E. — Ah! Alma Mater has seduced us from the 
Faery Queene ! yet, soft as a melody of love murmuring 
in the heart's core is the Eequiem of Reason, Fancy, 
Imagination, at thought or sight or sound of Name 
of Gextle Edmund Spexser ! — Name sculptui-ed in 
memory deeper than in marble, and wreathed with 
faery flowers, lowly as though warmed into being 
by the starlight — in keeping with the Poet's predomi- 
nating traits. You seldom meet with Edmund in a 
storm, or behold his eye " in a fine frenzy rolling;" 
but he conducts you on a cahnly -flowing tide, over 
waters whose little headings and undulations are lit by 
moonbeams, to a garden which you know has golden 
fruit, for now and then you see it; but the greater 
part of its produce is netted — sometimes very thickly 
netted. And now, if you persist in going, " A Dieu .'" 
in serious significancy. But harkye ! never reproach 
gentle Edmund again, unless for this — and then 
hushed as a spirit's voice, for he confesses the foible — 
that " the whole intention of his conceit is too clowdily 
enwrapped in allegorical devises."* 
* Letter to Raleigh. 



CHAPTER III. 



THE ELDER PROFFERS AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 



CHAPTER III. 



THE ELDER PROFFERS AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 



" [ cannot mend it, I must needs confess, 
And do remain as neuter." — York, in Rich. ii. 

Three days had elapsed since the interyiew which 
closed with the last chapter, and in company with 
applications for professional " opinions from all sorts 
of people," Rowland Hill's emissary for the district 
in which my chambers were situate, deposited therein 
on the morning of the fourth day, the original of the 
following : — 

" I^^ Lodge, 9th Ap. 41. 
" Did my parting salutation on Monday night in- 
clude an ' Au revoir?^ — My reminiscent faculties 
resolved into a committee of inquiry betimes this 



60 CHAPTER III. 

morning, and the result is present pyrrhonism. Once 
for all, prithee cause the ' deep umbrage' of my 
locale to prate of your whereabouts whensoever you 
will, and consider the old man here as your friend. 
I seldom remember to invite; make therefore this 
injunction a standing one, like the whoop of " He- 
reditary Bondsmen ! " 

" Your apprehension concerning the expediency of 
refixing the kalends to suit the disordered state of the 
months, may soothe itself in contemplating April, true 
to its ancient reputation of Inconstant, and not unlike 
a fair form torn by epilepsy. What a fit the poor 
month suffered on Friday ! Would the Meteorological 
Society accept my theory of the frequent sulkiness 
of Friday? — a crude allegory upon practices in the 
Commons' House ; to wit, that an elemental opposition 
goes on against the Tory Premier, Sol, on Fridays, 
and that the fine old fellow is sometimes overpowered 
for a brief space by an incongruous coalition, lashed 
into turmoil by a most obstreperous tail. 

" But he has recovered the mastery; and if any 
stormy malcontent, in the guise of a cloud, presumes 
to rise in his presence, and to cough or expectorate, 
the gorgeous Minister radiates the splenetic efiusion 
with prismatic colors. The profound in these matters 



CHAPTER III. 61 

affirm that we severally sustain an immense pressure 
of atmospheric air — I forget if it be hundreds-weight 
or tons per square inch of shoulder. — How is it that 
no philanthropic senator, casting a lynx-eye on the 
fardels which affect the masses, has entered his pro- 
test against this grievous oppression. Is it not enough 
to be taxed for light! — are we also to be burdened 
by air? Will no indignant son of Erin pray for a 
rippale of this union, or move, that the Phaeton of 
the cabinet do take a diplomatic drive up to Phcebus, 
and entreat for terms less onerous. 

" Well, with all this ponderosity without, I can 
still sing — (alas! 

' Omnia Tempus edax carpit — omnia sede movet!' 

Momentarily oblivious of dental deficiencies, I re- 
member that I can only say J Je suis content! 'Tis 
happy for us that these poor barks — our bodies — 
laden, as sage men at St. Stephen's assure us, heavier 
than barges, are constructed on and conceal a buoyant 
principle ! By the throttle (regarded as a channel of 
song, the marvellous throttle) of Sir Fred! so many 
things — above, around, beneath — have been to-day 
in compact alliance with that unreasoning lassie Joy, 
(espied awhile ago from Rydal, under guidance of a 

E 2 



62 



CHAPTER III. 



sunbeam, the lax rover !) that the weather-beaten bark 
whose anchorage is superscribed, has metaphorically 
— nathless its heavy freight of wrongs — been dancing 
like a very skiiF on summer-breeze-delighted billows. 
" You may think me here, alone, ivied-in, kinless, 
kithless, an old man to be pitied. Spare your com- 
passion ! Even were all my plumed pets under dis- 
cussion among worms, I have a petticoated pet who 
humours and enraptures me — and there is exquisite 
joy in loving her. I became part-proprietor of the 
darling at her baptism, nineteen years ago, and have 
given her more attention than was stipulated in the 
bond. Dutiful in much, the hussy has her conceits, 
— * gives proof,' as old John Harrington observes, 
^ of woman's ways;' and as to poetry, though she 
doesn't dispute openly the supremacy of King Will, 
her allegiance is undermined by the pathos of Queen 
Felicia and the charms of divers others of that line 
of queens." 

A few days afterwards, towards evening, I turned 
my back upon the smoke and stir of Town, and re- 
visited E. The morning had been marked by the 
'■'uncertain glory" peculiar to the month; but the 
afternoon was altogether lovely, and the sun set with 



CHAPTER 111. 63 

unusual splendour. E. was intently watching its 
parting rays when I entered, and had no sooner pro- 
nounced my welcome than he inquired if I had 
witnessed the transcendent lustre of the sun's decline. 

A disquisition rather than a colloquy followed my 
reply; for, happening to incorporate with it a sen- 
timent of Wordsworth, the old man remarked that 
he had omitted at our previous interview to ascertain 
definitively my opinion of this Poet, whose especial 
lot it was — he went on to observe — neither to be 
approved or discommended m moderation ^ but who 
was esteemed by the enthusiastic of one class as an 
angel of light, and regarded by the inveterate of 
another class as a " despised and broken idol." 

E. had tacitly and rightly accredited for admiration 
the frequent loans I had levied on the thoughts and 
expressions of Wordsworth, and avowed himself also 
in the foremost rank of the poet's admirers. He ex- 
pressed the sadness, not unpleasing, with which the 
'Contemplation of the departing sun had filled him — 
a state of feeling aided by solemn reflections suggested 
by the thoughtful Poet; and alluded to a severe 
critique upon his works, which he had recently read, 
indignant with its ill-concealed malevolence; advert- 
ing, with no profusion of compliment, to that portion 



64 CHAPTER III. 

of the commuuity of critics who are wont to indite an 
author's penal settlement with ink of an uncommonly 
acidulated quality. 

E. — " The grand affair/' says Rousseau, " is, to 
think differently ;" and the conception which, in the 
pomp and circumstance of publication, issues from 
one mind, is often a signal for the conflict of many; 
so that the dulcet-strain of the few, fitted by education, 
judgment, and reflection, to be Rulers and Guides 
of Opinion, is drowned in the penny-trumpet din 
of the canaille; for as wisdom is proverbially difiident 
and frequently reserved, so is folly as proverbially 
dogmatic and as generally loud. It is the deep river 
that flows in silence — the shallow in commotion: and 
so of minds; the superficial are contentious — the 
sterling, composed. It is unchristian to detest, but 
to the hyper-critic the extremity of my dislike verges 
on detestation; and when I encounter the profound 
absurdities of such commentators, I ask with Burns 
(and perhaps with more impatience than beseems the 
sere leaf) — 

" If honest Nature made you fools, 
What sairs your grammars?" 

Why should my Isle of Palms be made desolate as 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 65 

a City of the Dead, by the coloring of cynicism or of 
pragmatic stupidity? Is the living landscape, in 
which there may perchance be here a stunted tree 
and there an unseemly hovel — scarcely-seen unsight- 
liness which leaves the whole lovely, — are all the fair 
hues of its glory to be discolored before my gaze, 
because another, whose happiness is not nourished at 
the same fount with mine, has looked upon this pic- 
ture with a jaundiced eye? Such an one may make 
a survey, if he pleases ; but it is not desirable that he 
should report it — unless, indeed, to cheapen paper 
for the chandler. 

C. — How multitudinous and motley a host have 
levelled insult, contempt, and coarse abuse, at Words- 
worth — his design and its achievement! 

E. — Pardon me, the design of Wordsworth is yet 
far from its achievement. Other poets have left us 
much to learn, but Wordsworth more than any; and 
the age will be millennial in its character, which 
realises the heuu ideal of this Poet. It might not 
suit the temper of the present house of commons to 
create a poetic episcopacy, but in the event of such a 
measure the archbishopric should be named from Rydal 
Mount; and if I smile at the idea, I say it not irreve- 
rently; for the philanthropic aim of Wordsworth has 



66 CHAPTEK III. 

been to purify the avenues of the cotter's mind, and 
render it accessible to a new and noble enjoyment; — 
in few words, to correct the waywardness and wil- 
fulness of humanity by a pleasant " medicine of 
cherries."* He who kindles gratitude upon the altar 
of the heart, though he possess not the credentials 
of a priest, has performed an important part of the 
priest's office; and if Wordsworth but succeeds in 
illuming a spot " wildered else and dark," he sustains 
the hallowed joy by constant annunciation of 

" the cheerful faith, 
That all which we behold is full of blessings." 

I touch with reverence, profound as Cowper's, the 
pulpit: but in what terms — by what representation — 
can man be more eiFectually exhorted, than by this 
belief, to habitual thankfulness? — a feeling which 
should ascend, like perpetual incense, before that 
" Parent of good," who " openeth His hand and filleth 
all things living with plenteousness." 

(7. — And yet the Propounder of this Poetic Faith 
above all others salutary, has been above all others of 
his order, a mark for the violence of " envy, hatred, 
malice, and all un charitableness." 

* Sir Philip Sidney. 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 67 

E. — Provoked, not perhaps so much by the doc- 
trine as by its occasional development. But the lion 
may be stung by gnats, and the stately vessel be re- 
tarded by remorae. The " mild Apostate from poetic 
rule" was not, happily, irritated by petty persecution 
into the scornful silence of misanthropy, and left not 
the argosy, freighted with the principles of his new 
faith, to sink, because of the animalculse that clung to 
its keel. When Wordsworth arose, to announce his 
creed and expound its peculiarities, a thousand arrows 
were launched at his devoted head 3 among them, 
but not of them, were canons of fearful fulmination 
— literary ordnance of heavy caliber — which boomed 
like a knell of annihilation upon the ear of the 
period (for each era has its idiosyncratic eye and ear), 
and to Wordsworth then might have been not inap- 
propriately applied a line from Prior* — 

" Lord of his new hypothesis he reigns! " 
The Poet, in his hours of weariness and persecution, 
must, however, have found solace and invigoration in 
an axiom which he has couched in the beauty and 
power of truth: 

" Every gift of noble origin 
Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath: 



* Ode on Exodus iii. 14. 



68 CHAPTER III. 

and surely the prime lineaments of the Poet's aim 
bear the stamp of nobility, and approve themselves 

" Majestic in their own simplicity." 

I do not, of course, intend the term " simplicity" to 
apply to those indeterminable hypotheses of a pre- 
vious state of existence, of which Wordsworth is so 
eloquently credulous. That 

" The soul which rises with us, our life's Star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar," 

is a theory which may dominate in the imagination, 
and glow on the Poet's page, as it does in the Ode* 
from which I have quoted; but it is conjectural, and 
must remain so as long as the immortal part of the 
mysterious compound, man, is girdled by mortality. 

If I mistake not, it was Seneca who said, that the 
most miserable object which could be conceived, was 
an old man who would be young again. I had been 
young and was old, when first I imbibed with an 
appetite the spirit of Wordsworth ; but I remember 
well there ran along with my blood as it were, a 
rivulet of rapture, at the visible embodiment in lan- 
guage, of innumerable phantoms wherewith I had 

* Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood. 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 69 

been haunted ; and then, reflecting how comparatively 
torpid were my sensations to what they would have 
been in an earlier day, — then, for the first and last 
time in my life, I felt that I would renew my youth, 
were its renewal in my power. For the doctrines 
of this Poet require to be woven with the primary 
principles of our moral and intellectual being, and to 
grow with our growth; they are but grafted on the 
man; and the elements of age, although in casual 
instances ardent and predisposed, cannot retain the 
plasticity of youth : and indeed, the susceptibility to 
impression which lends a charm to the spring-time 
of life, would imply instability and be considered as 
indiscretion in the man of maturer years. But even 
now, when the " wild ecstasies" of former days are 
stilled into sober pleasure, there are no gradus ad 
Parnassum that I tread with a happier or more 
improved spirit than those shapen by the Poet 
Wordsworth. 

E. paused an instant to respire, and resumed with 
a Kvelier air and less soliloquisingly — 

Wordsworth is eminently the Oracle of Nature. 
He has tuned his lyre at various founts, and many 
of his less legitimate notes are cherished among the 
" sweet sounds and harmonies" which have their home 



70 CHAPTER III. 

in memory; but when he stands by the side of a 
murmuring stream, in fair field, or flowery dell, 
intent on the portraiture of unheeded loveliness, — on 
redeeming the scene in which he stands, like isolated 
minstrel, from the reputation of a voiceless solitude, — 
and on quickening in all things a spiritual intelligence ; 
then the Poet appears overwhelmed with " a sense 
sublime," and his harp-strings seem wrought of the 
fibres of our very being. He guides the admiring 
eye over the many-featured face of Nature, with a 
rod of enchantment, whose property it is to invest 
with grace and gladness every object to which it 
points; and there is not a single exiled feature but 
he rescues it from demerit, and does so endow it 
with charms, that you are led captive to the con- 
fession of a 

" glory in the grass and splendor in the flower." 

And, turning from Nature herself, how touchingly 
does he depict the child, and youth, and man, as 
swayed unconsciously by the Influence above us and 
around, to the intelligent observance of which, man- 
kind in thousands are deadened, by custom " heavy 
as frost." Here is a cast, not from the lineaments but 
from the characteristics of the child: — refer me, in the 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 71 

entire range of poetic delineation, to a happier illus- 
tration of boyhood and girlhood — the natural im- 
petuosity of the one, the sweet timidity and tenderness 
of the other : — 

" Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days, 

The time when, in our childish plays. 

My sister Emmeline and I 

Together chased the Butterfly, 

A very hunter would I rush 

Upon the prey — with leaps and springs 

I followed on o'er brake and bush. 

While she — God love her I— feared to brush 

Tlie dust from off its wings!"" 

Call nothing henceforth common; — Wordsworth has 
power to make a child's involuntary gesture poetical, 
and to extract something tangible and to look at from 
an urchin's sigh. 

Then, too, he has a singular art in sinister strokes. 
We are familiar with the apothegm, that " Vice, to 
be hated, needs but to be seen;" but you would not 
for a moment think of imputing flagrancy to a bag- 
man, because he passed a buttercup without halting 
to do it homage ; yet recite, with ordinarily-becoming 
emphasis, the following triplet, and Peter Bell the 
Potter becomes positively an atrocious character, for 



7^ CHAPTER III. 

regarding a field-flower in no other light than that 
of a field-flower ! — 

" A primrose by a river's brim 

A yellow primrose was to him, 

And it was nothings more!" 

From the beginning, in every age, the heaven- 
instructed Poet has recognised in the made a sha- 
dowing forth of the attributes of the Maker, and, if 
devout, has caused this discernment of the Deity to 
redound to His praise. It is the Poet's function 
— and how august a function! — to rend from the 
aspect of Nature the dense veil of indifiTerence thrown 
over it by habitual unconcerned intercourse, and, in 
the winning accents of" sweetly-uttered knowledge,"* 
to rouse the listless creature to wakefulness, — thence 
on to interested watchfulness of the Creator's opera- 
tions; to convince him that the garniture of earth 
and its star and sun-emblazoned canopy are not un- 
meaning display — inexpressive adornment — but to 
the observant eye are all replete with a sublime sig- 
nificance: that the humblest object which can attract 
his gaze, though seemingly inanimate or inert, is yet 
an instrument of design in the laboratory of the Lord 

* Sidney. 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. t 3 

of all. And tracing in all things an impress divine, 
and accepting as co-infinite with His power the wis- 
dom of the Almighty Mechanist, it is an essential part 
of the Poet's faith that nothing has been created vainly, 
but that each minute object is the component of a 
stupendous whole, and subserves in its vocation the 
inscrutable purposes of Omniscience. — And this ex- 
alting doctrine has been, I repeat, the Poet's argument 
from the beginning: — faithful to this great First 
Article of a Poet's Belief, the muse of Chaucer thus 
attests his credence in the early lispings of our mother- 
tongue : 

** Eternalle God that through thy purveyaunce, 
Ledist the worlde by certaine governaunce, 
In idle, as men saine, ye nothing make." 

Would not the time fail me to recount by name 
the illustrious succession of Defenders of this Faith? 
and have they not — each minstrel in his ministry — 
received a special gift? all, save Two of an unbounded 
realm — Wanderers by every of the thousand rills 
which flow " from Helicon's harmonious springs." 
Yes, to each, in his demonstration of the divinity 
perceptible in man's daily walk, has been allotted his 
individual province ; and in his own peculiar empire 



<4 CHAPTER III. 

Wordsworth stands pre-eminent. For him it is not 
enough that the silent wood be invested with ca- 
thedral solemnity and grandeur ; he creates a priest- 
hood by the wayside. He will not that our path 
through the Desert to the Garden be coldly allowed 
to possess occasional attractiveness; he clears a film 
from the traveller's eye, and his pilgrimage becomes 
not pleasurable only, but enchanting. It suffices him 
not simply to describe the earth's glory — he dissects 
it; and beneath the soft enamel of this lowly flower, 
he will trace its vivid veins and arteries, and will 
impress you with so acute a sense of its life, that 
thenceforth you feel it would be inhumanity to crush, 
with careless foot, the " active principle" in form so 
sensitive and lovely. He will not that you look upon 
the tree, to admire its outline only, or even that you 
gather an abstract morality from its foliage, now fair, 
now withering; he claims for it an eloquence more 
subtile — he insists that its leaves are legible. He re- 
presents all things, in heaven above and on the earth 
beneath, as ministering to man's faith and hope ; and 
would amalgamate all the heart's affections in one 
predominating passion of charity — one grand, ab- 
sorbing frater-feeling, whose flow of love should be 
ceaseless as the mercies of God! 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 75 

• When Death shall have lent his consecration to the 
Name of Wordsworth, and many shall " call him 
noble" who had been their reproach, this cannot but 
be told emphatically to his posthumous praise — that, 
moved mightily by " high objects," it was yet the 
labor of his best energy to make conspicuous dis- 
regarded things, and clothe in loveKness, dishonored. 
Maintaining ever the ubiquitous existence of that 

*' Vast chain of being, which from God began," 

it has characterised the world's minstrelsy to laud, with 
comparative exclusiveness, the Magnificent among 
created things — the Captivating among the graces and 
attributes of mankind; to descant on themes whereof 
he who spake in gifted language might rely on rapt 
listeners. For bowed by ever so weighty a bondage 
to Darkness or to Degradation, in humankind un- 
quenchable but with the master-flame of life is an 
instinctive veneration for the Great and the Glorious 
— not invariably, alas! for the Good. Thus in the 
celebration of objects or qualities which had already 
a latent fascination for the mind, the Celebrator had 
no war to wage with prepossessions, by opposition 
soon roused into passions, nor with antipathies that 
cling with greater tenacity at provocation. But the 



76 CHAPTER III, 

task of Wordsworth was facilitated by few and feeble 
latent consonancies of sentiment between the Bard 
and his auditory — mattentive though few. Leaving, 
in the " vast chain of being/' those links of ineffable 
refulgency or of majestic mould, about which it hardly 
needed that a Poet should stand to proclaim the 
manifest achievement of a God — he, the far-seeing 
and laborious, must clear from the corrosion of long 
neglect, or the injuries of cursory investigation, such 
dim, obscure links as should, when lucidly developed, 
display the elaborate handiwork of the Perfect One, 
and to the earnest eye of adoration disclose new and 
innumerable evidences of the beauty and harmony of 
creative skill. Confessedly imposing the enterprise, 
that clearance of the line of life from its Eternal 
Source, through earth, and sea, and "sunny air, 

" To stop — no record hath told where !" 

And very pleasant is it to contemplate the meek 
attitude of the Man in his absorbing and patient, 
noble but long-unapplauded work : 7iow, indeed, may 
they who hallow his genius in their heart of hearts, 
rejoice in this, his exultation, that by a " vision and 
a faculty divine" he has discerned and given effective 
prominency to many, many links, aforetime " remote 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 77 

from observation," — parts of that far-reaching chain 
which extends " through all the worlds;" and by the 
contagious virtue of a gifted intellect has stimulated 
the soul's desire to " commune with the glorious Uni- 
verse," and prepared it for a participation in all 
ecstatic, and reverential, and ennobling sensations. 

If Shakspeare, in a signification comprehending his 
intuitive familiarity both with man and the scene in 
which he moves, has been styled Nature's " darling,"* 
to Wordsworth (in an especial scenic signification,) 
may be applied the title, by himself suggested, (not 
to himself appropriated,) of Nature's foster-child ; 
and undoubtedly his master-strokes are drawn when 
clinging closest to the Mother's breast. Then in the 
vast Temple wherein he worships, not a niche but 
has its property of inspiration; — taught as from be- 
yond its " dome of sky, how beautiful ! " then through 
flori-tessellated aisles and the wood's green cloisters 

" the rich stream of masic winds along, 
Deep, majestic, clear, and strong:" 

yet, as I just now remarked, the Poet's lyre is some- 
times tuned to a key, perhaps less legitimate, though 
scarcely less euphonious, producing strains which 

* Progress of Poesy. 

F 2 



78 CHAPTER III. 

pass at once to the treasury of Music within us, and 
are numbered with its most welcome augmentations. 
I have no intention to particularise that prized mis- 
cellany ; but lest I " talk you dead" or into dormancy, 
I will refresh you by the recital of a solitary and brief 
constituent: — on the tympanum of an ear charmed, 
as is yours, by the Wordsworthian chant, the strain 
I am about to re-echo has the rousing power of a 
trumpet on a war-horse; and say, by whom has 
Indignant Patriotism more vernacularly spoken? A 
high-caste Spaniard, you will remember, is contem- 
plating the overtures made by Napoleon : — 

" We can endure that he should waste our lands, 
Despoil our temples, and, by sword and flame. 
Return us to the dust from which we came; 
Such food a tyrant's appetite demands: 
And we can brook the thought, that by his hands 
Spain may be overpowered, and he possess 
For his delight, a solemn wilderness 
Where all the Brave lie dead. But when of bands 
Which he will break for us — he dares to speak, 
Of benefits, and of a future day 
When our enlightened minds shall bless his sway — 
Then the strained heart of fortitude proves weak! 
Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare 
That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to bear.** 

It is delightful to recall the beauties of Words- 
worth, — to the severe be left the banquet furnished 



AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 79 

by his defects. The age is not yet prepared to ap- 
preciate the Poet in his fulness j and our hopes for 
the ultimate universality of his faith, repose, with all 
our other hopes, in the Future. He has left to his 
kind a telescope, which does not create, but which 
discloses the created and existing; — which charms 
both the eye and the mind ; to the one, revealing and 
expanding forms of beauty; — to the other, unfolding 
the expressive oeconomy of a m^yriad of things super- 
ficially accounted as insensate : acquisitions that, like 
the forbidden fruit in Eden, but without its penal 
contingency, are to the eye, pleasant; by the mind, 
to be desired to make one wise. But the eye — the 
eye of the period requires sublimation ; " this muddy 
vesture of decay" doth yet too grossly close in its 
visual faculty. Man and Nature, as they appear 
through the telescope of Wordsworth, assume no ideal 
grace, no visionary excellence ; but discerned by the 
instructions of Philanthropy, they wear a comeliness 
which engenders optimism, rendering it, as far as 
man is concerned, 

" a joy to think the best 
We may of humankind;" 

and, in reference to his position in nature, enforcing 
acquiescence in the assertion, 

*' Thy lot, O Man! is good, thy portion fair." 



80 CHAPTER III. 

Wordsworth has given a certain provocation to 
censure in having corroborated the testimony borne 
by all past ages, that indomitable Zeal is frequently 
heedless of the barriers erected by Opinion and the 
prevailing Taste; and in having continued the chain 
of evidence attested by the illustrious of yore, that 
Energy, when Herculean, is liable to the error of 
excess in its manifestation. One so wise as is he, 
would renounce the pretension to faultlessness ; and 
who would defend the exemption from fault of either 
Shakspeare or Milton? Johnson, in Rasselas, con- 
tends, that imperfections are reasonably to be ex- 
pected from those " who have much to do;" and 
Wordsworth, as the Founder of a Faith promulgated 
in the clamour raised by Prejudice and Jealousy, had 
assuredly much to do. Yet the dauntless champion 
has survived to witness his creed become of earnest 
and increasing acceptation, and the confessions of 
grateftil proselytes deck — gloriously as garlands — the 
Poet's retreat. May an old man's benedictory tribute 
be permitted to mingle with the heart-thanks which 
flow to the Seer of Rydal Mount — to Wordsworth, 
of the intellectual creditors of our age, a Chief among 
ten thousand! 



CHAPTER III. 81 

During the delivery of the greater portion of this 
comment^ E.'s manner had been marked by a gravity 
which contrasted strongly with the vivacity he had 
displayed at our previous interview. Now and then, 
at the recurrence of an image moulded in poetic grace, 
or in recounting the Poet's claims to praise, his eye 
brightened and his energy revived. His dissertation, 
void alike of effort reflective or enunciatory, flowed 
like a tranquil current of articulate thought — its pro- 
gress stayed for a moment at unfirequent intervals, 
and again calmly resuming its onward course, as a 
stream which petty obstacles at times impede, is soon 
impelled by accumulating waters rearward. As soon 
as E. had fairly ended, I recalled him to his former 
self by preparing for departure ; and starting at once 
into jocularity, he said, 

" Now if I were of that unenviable temperament 
which glorious Will has sketched by simply hinting 
at, that is, were I in danger of ^ creeping into the 
jaundice by being peevish,' I'd vent a spleen-simoom 
at being thus ensnared by your quiescence into that 
besetting sin of age, prolixity. My plea is that of the 
disordered Lear, ' I am an old man; pray you now 
forget and forgive.' I protest against the Talmud's 
libel on the softer sex, in asserting that of ten measures 



CHAPTEK lU. 



of garrulity awarded to our race, the women took 
nine! It does not break my heart, this consciousness 
of culpability, but it reminds me of the wail of Itho- 
cles, in the Broken Heart of Ford — 

" I now repent it: this now is now too late!'* 

Shade of the Poet! regard benignly a parody propped 
upon certitude and uttered in contrition — 

Our tongues elongate as our days decline. 

" Before you leave, hear, at least, my request, that 
you will defer till morning your return in future. 
Express, if it please you, the astonishment of the 
lawyer, at the absence of ' cauld-pausing Caution ;' 
but I ken more of you than you may suppose. — Are 
you not retained in the case of S — v. Wainwright?" 

I had that honor, and acknowledged it. 

" Eh Men : the plaintiff and I have been these four- 
teen years exchanging draughts — he is my wine- 
merchant — and the good man reposes confidence in 
me. On the morning in which my corns so narrowly 
escaped crushing by your retrogressive movement from 
the bookseller's window, I was on a mission to the 
merchant's ; and, while there, his solicitor entered to 
communicate an opinion of Mr. C. I ascertained the 



CHAPTER III. 83 

identity of this Mr. C. with the carnal cataclysm that 
had nearly overwhelmed me at the bookshop; and 
when the solicitor retired, S. related the particulars 
of his suit, as well as certain professional incidents to 
your personal credit : inter alia, the defence " 

I had long been on terms of intimacy with the 
good-hearted vintner, whom to know was to esteem ; 
and remembering his loquacity, and apprehensive of 
exaggerated commendation, I felt a slight effeminate 
tinge getting the better of my professional sang froid 
— a mark of modesty so monstrous, that the old man 
reined-up abruptly, and exclaimed, astounded, 

" Eh, sirs ? a blush on the face of a lawyer ! I vow, 
then, the tribe is basely slandered and maligned : the 
calumny of the Talmud, after this, sinks into a ^^ soft 
impeachment;" and in dilating upon the qualities 
essential to the appreciation of Wordsworth, it seems 
I have not been feeling for a pulse in the dead ! " 

I bore with all the fortitude I could summon, the 
raillery excited by the display of a constitutional 
infirmity which I had hardly mastered at that time, 
but which, fortunately, does not now interfere with 
the imperturbable nonchalance indispensable (or nearly 
so) to the legal profession, wherein reputation is not 
a little favored by the preservation of a wintry ex- 



84 CHAPTER III. 

terior. Women must have strange tastes or the com- 
passion of angels (7 attribute it religiously to the last 
alternative,) to wed with lawyers of first-rate, unco- 
guid physiognomical advantages (professional), cased, 
as they appear to be, in a covering of that complexion 
which seems made of soiled skins, — a hue bloodless, 
but less like the untrodden snow on Linden, than that 
in a thoroughfare, which is in process of dissolution 
and dingy. 

Previously to leaving Ivy Lodge on this occasion, 
I was bent upon obtaining information of the visits 
there of the child mentioned in E.'s letter; and to 
avoid returning unenlightened, I was constrained to 
prosecute an indirect examination, which elicited for 
the maiden the ready Elder's affectionate praises, and 
for me, sufficient data whereupon to determine my 
next appearance at the Lodge. E.'s fondness and 
fervour for his godchild was of that order of love 
which, according to Scott, has in it " less of earth 
than heaven;" and the glowing old man's tone was 
so thankful for this treasure of his heart, that, as he 
indulged in its expression, his feelings deepened and 
his voice grew tremulous — imparting to his language 
and his look an effect of indescribable pathos. 



CHAPTER III. 85 

" God's name be blessed ! " said E. looking upwards 
with patriarchal grace^ " His mercy be praised for 
this one gift, that having endowed me with the heart 
to love, I am not left in the wide world to mourn in 
loneliness that unencountered one, for whom our 
Human Nature yearns; — in w^hose absence,, if deeply 
felt, the craving of Solicitude knows no appeasing, 
but supplicates the boon, with plaint fathomless as 
the source of life and holy as the hope of heaven! 
Of the bosom's better instincts, the least despoiled of 
its divine simplicity is, methinks, the pure longing 
to lavish our heart's wealth upon a cMld; and even 
where, as here, the strong paternal bond is wanting, 
the great Father of love doth sometimes implant a 
principle exotic, whose tendrils intertwdne and wreathe 
around their object with such tenacity and tenderness, 
that stronger I can hardly conceive to originate in 
man the Parent. Once — lang syne — I might have 
cherished the hope of closer ties, and did cherish; 
and e'en now, encompassed by the goodness of an 
overflowing Hand, this scarce-resigned heart is apt 
to repine at what the Father willed not; and stirs to 
re-invest with the irksome mantle of mortaHty a spirit 
which — thanks to the Finisher of our Faith — it is 
my confidence as that I live, is enrolled among that 



86 CHAPTER III. 

blissful band from whose faces God hath for ever 
wiped away all tears. There is a stanza of Campbell 
that moves deep feelings in me like a heaving flood 
when I think of it, for in its solemn plaintiveness 
I hear again that angel's breath, while lingering at 
the portal of the City whose dwellings have their 
light and joy from the countenance of the Lamb : 

* Clasp me a little longer, on the brink 

Of fate, while I ean feel thy dear caress; 

And when this heart hath ceased to beat, oh! think, 

And let it mitigate thy woes' excess, 

That thou hast been to me all tenderness, 

And Friend to more than human friendship just. 

O ! by that retrospect of happiness, 

And by the hopes of an immortal trust, 

God shall assuage thy pangs when I am laid in dust.* " 



COLLOQUY 11. 



TURNING MAINLY UPON HOLY MOTHER. 



COLLOQUY 11. 



CHAPTER IV. 

" And sure there seem of human kind 

Some born to shun the solemn strife ; 
Some for amusive tasks designed 
To soothe the certain ills of life, 
Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose, 
Call forth refreshing shades, and decorate repose." 

Shenstone. 

There were three souls in the sanctum at Ivy Lodge 
on a laughing day in merry May. The Church, 
by a rather affecting process, quite apart from necro- 
mancy, has since resolved those three into two, after 
an honest and straight-forward fashion, on which one 
needs not to be over-explicit. I have before hinted 
at this " catastrophe." That eulogistic description in 
detail which it might have been excellent gratification 
to attempt for E.'s god-daughter, as such, would be 



90 CHAPTER IV. 

egregious impropriety under an existing connection. 
I have two codes of law, by one of which I regulate 
my conduct socially, and by the other, my conduct 
professionally ; and so distinctly maintained are their 
respective dictates, that, out of court or chambers, I 
jealously avoid hyperbole and equivoque, and am 
careful, when I doff the coif, to don sincerity. The 
testimony, too, of all interested witnesses, is inherently 
vulnerable ; and the portrait of a young wife, drawn 
by a spouse peradventure uxorious, could hardly be 
set up for the scrutiny of Candour, the mind of the 
painter being by hallucination blinded to the fault 
of an extravagant use of vermilion. So, like Bassanio 
before the gaudy golden casket, " I will none of it." 
It may be reasonable — or, to avoid all contention 
about terms — it may be sufferable to laud the object 
of one's idolatry while yet advancing on that path- 
way of pleasant meanderings which wend ultimately 
through the church-porch and have their terminus at 
the altar-rail; but that goal once attained, the sound 
of rhapsody beyond grates on the general ear, and 
incites to sarcasm and a search after hlots. I restrain 
my ink, therefore, at the chops of a channel, into 
which, if its current once entered. Impartiality might 
be deluged, and the pilotage of Prudence despised. 



CHAPTER IV. 91 

It is comfortable to hear the cooing of old couples, 
who, having well-nigh ended their journey over the 
thorny wilderness, and loving the more tenderly for 
its lacerations, are justified in the congratulation, that 
the hazardous result of custom has approved itself in 
reciprocal solace, not in satiety. But I distrust the 
discretion of those who, barely entered on the perilous 
noviciate of the nuptial noose, announce their conjugal 
felicity to be secured on a lease for life, and confi- 
dently calculate upon realising a vague amount of 
bliss, equivalent to Paradise regained. Experience, 
however, like the wary inspector of a building -plan, 
made captivating by impracticable embellishments, 
reminds the credulous and eager candidates for so 
blissful a possession, that the paradise which fascinates 
them exists merely in design; — that the soil (de la 
nature humainej is always uncertain, and may be 
sometimes treacherous, concealing stubborn rocks 
and gnarled roots; — that this portal of the home 
of Pleasure, to-day gaudy in fanciftd decoration, may 
to-morrow be made grotesque by mutilation, or be 
pitilessly shattered by storm ; — and that the fabric, in 
its best estate, lodges, with its possessors, a little 
reptile-horde of bickerings in embryo, which, exposed 
to a particular heat, burst from the shell at once into 



9^ CHAPTER IV. 

vigour, and are deadlier in their enmity than armed 
men. These cautious cavils raised by Experience 
are not agreeable to dwell upon, but they lend no 
feeble aid to Prudence, in advising the suppression 
of a premature proclamation of happiness which is 
to he. " The world's a stage" on which the scene 
sometimes shifts as soon as the poor player has strutted 
a few paces; and in the scene of a marriage, the 
merry bridal-peal has often almost subsided into the 
note of burial; — so brief the intermission between 
transport and the tomb. To sum up, therefore, I 
conceive it better becomes the newly-married to be 
taciturn than babblers about bliss, lest at any time a 
nuptial dirge should suddenly succeed a nuptial ditty. 

The month of May could never have presented a 
eomelier aspect or have diifused a kindlier influence 
than at the time of which I have spoken. The quire 
about Ivy Lodge were urging their tiny throats to a 
dangerous distension; and the Elder's eyes were 
ready to start from their sockets in a perfect fever 
of exhilaration. 

E. — " Welcome hither, as is the spring to the 
earth ! * " Mr. C. By frantic Fred ! (Mary, is that bird 
inebriated?) by Sir Fred! we are to-day most highly 
* Winter's Tale, 5,, i. 



CHAPTER IV. 93 

favored. My daugliter-in-baptism, Sir; — Mary, this 
is Mr. C, Yv'ho promises to surpass thee as a patient 
listener^ child : — nay, no incredulous smile ; 'tis 
honest verity, I vow. We practice here. Sir, no 
" fashion or ceremony — the appurtenance of wel- 
come," as Hamlet hath it; and had " the old sexton. 
Time," plyed his pickaxe less ruthlessly parmi les 
dents, I'd sing you a strain of welcome, shrill as Sir 
Fred's. Seriously, Madam, is our parlour becoming 
a republic? — these yellow villains take unbounded 
licence when the Lodge is under female government, 
and I may as well go whistle to the wind as call the 
rioters to order. — Have done, ye chartists ! Prithee 
fetch wool, good Mary, wool, for the ears of Mr. C. — 
I have cause to be concerned for a faculty of hearing 
so long-suffering ! " 

There be some that say. Who will show us any 
good? Of course on the ears of such the Priest's and 
the Poet's representations fall alike heavily, and either 
do not reach the heart or awaken in it no willing 
response. For the health's sake of the mass, such 
disafTectedness before heaven and before man should 
be treated as of old was leprosy — the victim isolated 
from the herd, and left in solitude to inspire the 

G 2 



94 CHAPTER IV. 

malaria of his own breath. Priests have their note 
of terror to sound and re-sound ; but ere its echoes 
cease to vibrate on the awed ear of Conscience, the 
strain swells into triumph, and lifts the creature, just 
now depressed, from the tombs of Palmyra to the top 
of Pisgah — from the survey of ruins to the recognition 
of a present large fruition and to the sublime expec- 
tancies of Hope. " The priestly Guide for me," says 
mine ancient friend, " is him who leads, not drives ; 
and who, as we travel onwards through the valley of 
the shadow, has a smile for its sweet-scented flowers, 
and takes comfort in them as types of a richer produce. 
Still the pastoral guide must check the admiration 
that would suggest a folding of the hands to slumber 
and the impulse to seek a long repose there ; for the 
valley has it& 

, " sunken glens, whose sunless shrubs must weep," 

and down from the steep hills will, at some hour, 
sternly sweep the Storm on the unwary who would 
insist on patient rest despite the warnings of the wise. 
But the poet-iediohev is under no grave coercion to 
reiterate the solemn cry, " All flesh is grass and the 
glory thereof as the flower :" to him, whose mission 
leads him out among God's works that he may report 



CHAPTER IV. 95 

llieir language, there is a delectable compulsion to be 
cheerful — ay, and if the charms of the progeny he 
adopts excite more praiseful pride than reverend 
oracles consider orthodox, let such heterodoxy be 
castigated by the Clergy : though the priesthood hath 
in it many favorers — in our own list of friends, one 
eloquent supporter of the heresy, who — forgive him. 
Gracious Queen ! and be lenient, my Lord Bishop of 
London ! — has, in this ivied cell, drawn comparisons 
between the attire worn in palaces and the petals of 
a pale lily, at which, though derogatory to royal 
robes, the lovely Mistress of the royal wardrobe could 
not for her life have frowned. The old Clerk, may 
it not displease your Majesty, is heartwhole in his 
loyalty — his offering of our Mother's Petitions for 
the Queen attest /A«^y — and an Illustrious Precedent, 
my Lord Bishop, will reconcile you to a faithful 
Shepherd, whose anxious eye but seldom wanders 
from his fold, and who distils a wondrous medicinal 
property from simple flowers seen in bypaths and in 
the fields wherein his lambs have their pasturage." 

Beally this digression originally proposed, and now 
re-proposes, but one brief moment's " aside" from the 
Elder in his mirth, to ejaculate, as travellers are wont 
to do at sudden introductions to sweet landscapes on 



96 CHAPTER IV. 

the highroad, " A pleasant prospect ! " or " A charm- 
ing scene ! " Who will show us any good, indeed ! 
Why on the right reverend finding of Bishop Hall 
eleven excellent things have been discovered and 
triumphantly proclaimed, one of which has reference 
to " a cheerful companion without vanity;" — par 
excellence, I take it, a religious old man mirthful. 
Why the bishop halted in his inventory on the de- 
ficient side of a dozen, and yet left out of his catalogue 
the talk of very young children, is a circumstance 
which the editor of the next edition of his Life will 
oblige us by explaining. Bishop Taylor would never 
have omitted that item in his list of good and pleasant 
things. That admirable priest alludes specially to the 
allegro movements of a father's heart in the hearing 
of such "pretty conversation:" let the man remodel 
himself without delay to whom such conversation 
proves no pleasure. Of sublunary joys, second perhaps 
to that which " stands alone, like Adam's recollection 
of the Fall," is the racy dialect of one's firstborn in its 
early efforts at elocution. So, at a subsequent stage, 
pregnant with pleasure is the wild shout of careless 
childhood — the glad eye kindling at the call to 
revelry. Nor, when tempered by an instructed mind, 
less pleasant is it to witness glee in a guileless old 



CHAPTER IV. ^7 

iage; — a comfortable sign it is of enduring verdure 
about the venerable tree against which Time has 
upheaved his iron arm indestructively ; — a cheering 
testimony that the advances of Decay and approxima- 
tion of the Grave have brought no gloomy Winter to 
the soul; a welcome earnest rather, to the hoary 
traveller, of the calm of a protracted Autumn, sub- 
merging at last into the glories of an eternal Spring. 

E. — If Regret could possibly to-day find entrance 
into Ivy Lodge, her only plea were this — that you 
came not earlier, and have thus lost intercourse with a 
revered friend of mine, the Rector of a neighbouring 
parish. Mr. F. is, Hke myself, a sexagenarian; and 
my views on church polity and construction of doctrine 
coincide with his in every particular. Have you ever 
met with persons with whom you felt a pleasure — an 
active pleasui'e in diifering; and others, with whom 
to disagree was to maintain integrity at the expense 
of real regret? Mr. F. is, in my circle of acquaint- 
ance, of this latter class ; a man of so much worth and 
sound judgment that it would be grief to me to differ 
from him. Then we are both thorough sticklers for 
the excellency of Holy Mother; but though her 
reverend son and servant will not bate one jot to her 



98 CHAPTEK IV. 

adversaries, he maintains the meekness of the Christian 
champion 3 and while, as from a superior eminence, 
he looks down upon " the errors and wanderings, the 
mists and tempests in the vale below, his prospect is 
chiefly with pity, not with contemptuous pride." 'Tis 
verily music to the mind to hear that eloquent old 
man recounting the virtues and superiorities of our 
Mother — for we both designate our Church by that 
fond appellative. If the liberty of Truth were again 
subjected to the shackle, F. is one of the many who 
possess, and would prove, the constancy and courage 
of a martyr. The excellent man comes here occasion- 
ally, but only too rarely, and we congratulate each 
other upon the growing influence and cheering pros- 
pects of the Establishment; and when he tarries 
leisurely, and Mary is not here to suffer penance by 
speechlessness, we indulge in chess — at which (in 
modesty 'tis spoken,) the layman is rather more au 
fait than his spiritual teacher. 

C. — Apr&pos of chess: I was amused the other 
day in reading extracts from an ancient and curious 
book, entitled " The Game and Playe of the Chesse, 
translated out of the French, and imprinted by William 
Caxton. Fynysshed the last day of Marche, the yer 
of our Lord God a thousand foure hondred Ixxiiij." 



COLLOQUY II. 99 

The book is considered, upon high authority, to have 
been the first work printed in England ; and in it the 
translator assumes for the game of chess a high moral 
ground: he dedicates his book to the Duke of Clarence, 
to whom he sends " peas, healthe, joy e, andvictorye; 
not presumyng to correcte or empoigne ony thynge 
agenst his noblesse, but to thentent that other of what 
estate and egrese they stand in, may see in this said 
lityllbooke, that they governed themself as they ought 
to doo." He dates the origin of the game to the time 
of Emsmerodach, king of Babylon, " a jolly man, 
without justice," and a parricide; and states as " the 
first cause wherefore it was founded, — to correct and 
reprove the king." He quotes the " holy doctour 
saynt Paule," where the apostle says that " alle that is 
wrytten is wrytten unto lerning;" and he intends, 
though he travels to a little distance in expressing it, 
that his " lityll and symple booke" should lessen " the 
nombre of foles, which, saith Salamon, is infenyte." 
And in a second edition of his book, he asserts, " that 
the kyng, that tofore tyme had been vyctous, and dis- 
ordynate in his lyuyng, was made just and vertuous, 
debonayr, and ful of vertues unto all peple. And a 
man that lyuyth in thys world without vertues lyueth 
not as a man, but as a beste. Thenne, late every 



100 CHAPTER IV. 

man, of what condycion he be that redyth or herlth 
this litel book redde, take thereby ensaumple to amend 
hym." And for as many as read it leniently, he " shal 
pray, that God, of his grete mercy, shall reward them 
in his euerlastyng blisse in heuen, to the whiche he 
brynge ns that wyth his precious blood redemed us. 
Amen." 

E. — The pious perorations of the olden time would 
now be deemed " preposterous conclusions." Such a 
termination to a modern treatise on chess, would be as 
unexpected, as the recent benediction of a preacher, 
who, after enumerating the merits of an exemplary 
spinster deceased, and representing her to the special 
imitation of the single sisterhood, ending by observing 
to them — " Thus she lived, and thus she died, a 
blameless old maid — which that you may all do, may 
God of Ms infinite goodness grant.^^ 

You expressed, some time ago, the interest which 
conjecture upon the mystery of music possessed for 
you. Very various are the tastes of men. One of my 
most estimable friends — a man of fine feeling, whose 
memory is a kind of poetic jewel-house — has assured 
me, that he should be disappointed to find the in- 
fluence of music, under any development, a primary 
ingredient in the joys of heaven. He and the Rector 



COLLOQUY II. 101 

are at antipodes in this opinion; and I once heard 
the pastor persuade his people to value the unheeded 
privilege of assimilating their worship to the adoration 
of the angels, in terms which I cannot forget, and 
with impressiveness I cannot imitate. Thus spake, 
emphatically, the zealous priest: — 

" It is the peculiar province of Sacred Music to 
liberate the immortal mind from the thraldom of 
earthly thoughts, and on the wings of holy harmony 
the soul uprises towards heaven. In sacrificial song 
it is that the homage of the sinner and the seraph 
correspond in character, however dissimilar in degree; 
and, when sincere, it is a religious rapture of the 
supremest order of delight. It gives birth to an 
indescribable joy — but Piety is reconciled in it, and 
the majesty of the Most High propitiated, for it is 
that pure joy which accompanies ever the kindling 
emotions of Gratitude." F. paused for a moment, 
as in thought " too deep for words upon their stream 
to bear;" and you heard your bosom in its beatings, 
so profound was the silence of the sanctuary. " ! " 
resumed the priest, " O lamentable unconsciousness 
of its overwhelming debt to the Power which might 
have hurled us into the abyss of torment, but for that 
mysteriously-prevailing Love which would aUure us 



102 CHAPTER IV. 

to the realms of bliss! — deplorable insensibility to 
Mercy, or alarming indifference to its manifestations, 
is that of the heart torpid and voiceless in presence 
of Him in whom it lives, and moves, and has its 
being. How marvellous the contradiction and the 
coldness too often visible in the demeanour of Chris- 
tians, congregated ostensibly for united praise ! Say, 
if this be in very truth our purpose, would it not be 
rational to study the example, and strive to emulate 
the fervour, of beings who worship in a loftier sphere ? 
— there is not a reasonable soul in this assembly but 
responds affirmatively; but, alas! of this assenting 
throng, how few are there who do not reproach 
themselves in the acknowledgment. What! confess 
that the celestial example is worthy of all emulation, 
and yet abide in this unbroken lethargy ! Is the altar 
of Gratitude within you so ice-bound, that incessant 
bounties from on high cannot excite there the audible 
accents of a thanksgiving song ? Yet, as many of ye 
say in words, and all, I trust, in spirit, ' it is meet 
and right, and our bounden duty, to magnify the 
Lord God of sabaoth:' — avowing this, quit ye like 
men. — Think ye, my brethren, that sombre Silence 
hath part or place in the bright land to which we 
hasten? — ah, which of you would accredit me if I 



COLLOQUY II. 103 

said^ that in the clime whose very atmosphere is 
harmonical there lived one songless spirit — that among 
all its countless myriad of minstrels there could exist 
one sullen lyre ? 

" Sacred Music irradiates the mysteries of Faith, — 
with the glow of imagination gives vividness to the 
gorgeous creations of Hope, — and induces a sense 
of exaltation wherein 

• We feel that we are greater than we know:*^ 

thus, its influence subjugates the grosser qualities of 
the heart; expands its nobler capacities; familiarises 
its conceptions with whatsoever things are pure; 
advances the mortal to the dignity of a ministering 
spirit; and accelerates the progress of the mind to- 
wards that eminent altitude of perfection which, while 
within its earthy confines, the soul has not freedom 
to attain. The assurance of a vast beatitude, too 
illimitable, exhaustless, and exquisite for the com- 
prehension of man in his degeneracy, is the revealed 
distinction between the supreme enjoyments of heaven 
and the subordinate pleasures permitted to the up- 
right of the world; but the grateful power of harmony 
on the complicated fabric of natural feeling, would 
encourage in us the expectation that the large bounty 



104 CHAPTER IV. 

of enthroned Benevolence has mingled the raptures 
of choral consummation with the guerdon in reserve 
for His redeemed ones. ^ The ransomed of the Lord 
shall return with singing unto Zion ;' and not alone 
are the felicities which there await them aiErmed to 
be indistinguishable to human eye and inconceivable 
by human heart; it is likewise pronounced concern- 
ing them, that the ear of man hath not heard the 
rich reward which God hath prepared for them that 
love Him. 

" The dynasty of depravity in the constitution 
of man has, in truth, despoiled the purity of those 
glorifying strains vernacular to the stainless soul; 
and anthems ascending with simultaneous charm 
from the high estate of primal innocence to the 
sphere of the excellent glory, have been exchanged 
by its dominion for dissonant and broken music. 
Yet — though sin and sorrow have subdued the tone 
of man's rejoicing — the victory over Death, the 
purification from defilement, redemption, unmerited 
providence, the wiping away of tears, and the eternal 
joy, are themes which remain to our fallen race; and 
invited to a reconciled Father, his rescued children 
may well forget their fleeting infirmities in the inter- 
minable perspective of peace — their light afflictions 



COLLOQUY II. 105 

in the glad heritancy of a weight of glory, and still 
delight to come before his presence Trith a song ! " 

This, continued E., is all that Mary and I conld 
bring away, for closet-consideration; but the effect 
of F.'s discourse, aided, as I have remarked, by an 
extraordinarily-impressive delivery, was highly grati- 
fying ; and when you attend his church, you will not 
fail to remark there the " meek fervour of devotion," 
which Wordsworth laments as a characteristic of an- 
cient piety, defective in the modern: nor will you 
wonder that the multitude should be all absorbed in 
the moving eloquence of the Church's petitions, when 
you hear them, in all their sacred force and compre- 
hensive meaning, from the lips of this pious man, 
who, imputing to form and ceremony no availing^ 
influence />er se, does not therefore disdain to demand 
veneration for antiquity, and cement attachment by 
representations and persuasions, which the schismatic 
rather than devout might pronounce to be conducive 
to a superstitious regard, but which, by more ingenuous 
disciples, are found to promote an ardency of affection 
for the form, which aids rather than supersedes the 
spirit of a reasonable worship. The signs of the 
times induce an apprehension, that the bosom of the 



106 CHAPTER IV. 

Church will be agitated ere long by ultra-advocates 
of two classes — the one insisting too pertinaciously on 
precision in ritual ceremonies; the other, displaying 
a lax observance, amounting, in the indiscreet, to dis- 
respect and contumely, exceedingly to be deprecated. 
The tenets of F. are, I conceive the juste milieu; and 
the calm authority of opinions such as his, will main- 
tain our holy Mother's equilibrium, until her querulous 
children shall " cease from troubling." Many there 
are who prophecy " Woe ! woe !" some in timid alarm 
— in envious gratulation others — at the prospective 
issue of these dissensions ; and an old friend — a kind 
of brother in my youth, alack ! a weary distance to 
look back upon — would have made me melancholy a 
few days ago, if gloomy predictions from a venerable 
prophet could have prevailed over anticipations more 
sanguine. I wish you to understand the complexion 
of that virtue which F. attributes to the extraneous 
circumstance of antiquity and of hereditary sonship. 
He would urge his flock to scrutinise the intri?zsic 
strength and moral grandeur of the Ark of our Faith 
— to mark well her bulwarks ; and is content that by 
her own merits she stand or fall. You shall not 
— wafted in a tiny boat, on sunny ripples in Spring, 
around a noble bark motionless as a structure built 



COLLOQUY n. 107 

up in stateliness and beauty through the pellucid sea 
— I say you shall not in a petit shallop contem- 
plate the Flower of your country's fleet with a more 
complacent assurance of security and overpowering 
sense of majesty, than when on the current of that 
Charmer's oratory you " go round about and tell the 
towers" of Christian-England's Ark. Then, after 
demonstrating her superior construction to that of the 
surrounding small-craft, and convincing you of her 
surpassing sailing qualities by reference to many a 
remembered contest and truthful record — then will 
he press her upon our affections by energetic argu- 
ments ah extra. — " Our father's,''' says he, " our 
FATHERS reared this Ark, despite of terrors — 7iever 
be their holy heroism forgotten !_and having launched 
it on the tide of Time, they committed themselves to 
its guardianship; and generations have since been 
borne in it to the haven where they would be. And 
in our voyage, shall ive hesitate to embark in that 
imperishable vessel which has survived the wreck of 
ages and which shall survive ? ' From the cradle to 
the grave we are on the stormy sea;' but may we 
not well exult, that in trusting the treasure we carry 
with us to the keeping of the Ancient Mariner, we 
are able to confide in our Pilot ? And shall we, then. 



108 CHAPTER IV. 

look indiiferently on, while the foes of the ship we 
sail in are attempting to dismast the stately fabric 
which they cannot overwhelm ? " 

C. — You make me anxious to hear your clerical 
friend : his sentiments appear to be in strict accordance 
with what I recognise as the theory of legitimate 
churchmanship — the love of our Church primarily as 
the uncompromising Expositress of Truth ; secondarily, 
because bequeathed to us — like the inestimable Hope 
of Glory — at the price of anguish and of blood. The 
wise man preserves with solicitude the costly pur- 
chase of a prudent ancestor ; and the unlettered poor 
regard, with religious carefulness, the heir-looms of 
sires who sleep. The Protestant Church descends to 
us as a legacy which inherent worth enriches and 
historic associations sanctify; and Montgomery, in 
extolling the past chivalrous patriotism of Britons, 
expresses our estimation of the valiant who reared 
and defended the nation's best bulwark: — 

*' Their deeds of old renown inspire 
Our bosoms with our fathers' fire; 
A proud inheritance we claim 
In all their sufferings, all their fame." 

And now our Church resembles, morally, a luminary 
in whose radiations are cheering and all-hallowing 



COLLOQUY II. 109 

influences — influences whicli can hardly altogether 
expire while the elements of our present nature con- 
stitute man. For, amid the incessant tumult of sec- 
tarianism, enlightened by that calm beam which the 
experienced Instructors and judicious Senators of our 
age are concerned in shedding upon the intellect of 
the people — the flickering meteor-light of mere se- 
cular intelligence tranquillised and gently coerced by 
the salutary companion-ray of Religion — enlightened 
thus, unperverted by sophistry, unmoved by scorn, 
the heart which values a stedfast anchor for its faith 
will render its ready tribute of admiration to the 
fortitude that wrought it; and with the reverence 
which from a child he is taught to yield to Wisdom, 
will the Man blend the veneration he instinctively 
owns to Antiquity. To me it is joyful to perceive, 
on all sides, a simultaneous endeavour in the clergy 
to rivet the links which attach the English Churchman 
to the ancestral altar, by appealing to feelings 

" Essential and eternal in the heart;" 

an earnest striving to quicken a soul in the cold habit 
of modern conformity; to strengthen present decre- 
pitude by illustrations of primitive vigour; to fetter 
us by the permitted rumination — not the unlicensed 

H 2 



110 CHAPTEli IV, 

vagaries — of Fancy, as well as by the stirring re- 
presentations of Reality; and, by poetic pictures of 
past attachment, 

'* Leaving that beautiful which still was so. 
And making- that which was not, till the shrine 
Becomes religion, and the heart runs o'er 
With silent worship. * * The dead still rule 
Our spirits from their urns." 

E. — lithathe the character of your churchmanship 
Mr. F. is your priestly champion; and in the Eccle- 
siastical Armoury of Wordsworth might you have 
found a cartel, in terms entrancing as the strains of 
Momus' Mother and the Syrens : 

" More sweet than odours caught by him who sails 

Near spicy shores of Araby the blest, 

A thousand times more exquisitely sweet 

The freight of holy feeling which we meet. 

In thoughtful moments wafted by the gales 

From fields where good men walk, or bowers wherein they rest." 

But I am guilty of a kindred superstition. I remember 
part of an ex cathedra exhortation to fidelity to holy 
Mother, made by F. during the Voluntary-system 
struggle, and delivered from the pulpit because " he 
believed it due from him to warn his people against 
the craft and malice of designing men, and could not 



COLLOQUY IT. Ill 

hope for the opportunity of doing so from another 
place." I might justly say of F. that 

" Surely never did there live on earth 
A man of kindlier nature;" 

and it is not in the power of ordinary provocations to 

" stir the constant mood of his calm thoughts, 
Or put them into misbecoming plight;" 

but of the pressure of three-score years the priest 
seems utterly unconscious when his feelings are 
quickly touched ; and at that period of hubbub about 
religious equality, the honest man waxed warmer with 
indignation than I had or have ever seen him : for he 
is well read in man; and the rancorous enmity which 
bound in brief and ineffective alliance an incongruous 
phalanx, using Conscience for its watchword, and 
trampling upon Consistency, excited his animadversion 
and disgust. So it was in no " well-bred whisper" 
that he reminded his parishioners of their privileges 
and line of duty. After manifesting the injustice 
which the conscientiously-inspired were panting to 
promote, he adverted to the sleepless spirit of an- 
tagonism to the Establishment, and said, 

" It becomes your duty, Men and Brethren, to 



112 CHAPTER IV. 

emulate the adversaries' activity, deprived of its acer- 
bity. Our Church is calumniated to the very corners 
of the land by a host of vindictive assailants, whose 
familiar theme is the vituperation of the established 
order of things, and who, in the face of their system's 
poverty and nakedness, avouch vociferously that it is 
" rich, and increased with goods, and hath need of 
nothing." And now are we summoned to preserve 
from the fierce desecration of the profane and the 
envious intermeddling of the equivocally-pious, the 
Casket of Christian Truth, the consecrated Repository 
of our Religion, the Ark of that New Covenant whose 
light was to lighten the Gentiles, and which, preserved 
intact in this our favored isle, shall one day be declared 
the glory of God's Israel; — the Landmark for our 
souls' guidance, the setting-up of which was so sacred 
an enterprise with our fathers, that the soil in which 
this landmark was enfixed may almost be said to have 
been soddened by the warm gushings of their life- 
blood. And the Virgin Daughter which they alienated 
from a Mother whom corrupt men had sullied, has, 
in process of time, herself acquired the sanctity of 
maternity; and in this present day, amid renewed 
but most wanton efforts to defame, dismantle, and dis- 
honor her, are we appealed to as sons, to whom a 



COLLOQUY II. 113 

consciousness of filial responsibility and a sentiment of 
filial affection are not considered foreign. That nursing- 
Mother to whose arms we were carried for her bap- 
tismal benediction, and who will receive us again to 
her bosom when we rest from our labors, demands of 
us, Is a Parent's defence in a gainsaying age no part 
of the duty of her children ? Guarding us from the 
awful peril of Infidelity, from the difficulties and 
bewilderments of Dissent, from the solitariness of 
Schism, from the slavery of Superstition, and, by the 
pure light of Truth, guiding our feet into the way of 
Peace, is there no emotion of gratitude in our hearts, 
prompting us to rally round her standard, and vigo- 
rously contend for the Faith once delivered to the 
Saints? Martyrs — a noble army, to whom life was 
less dear than her integrity — call us to the contest. 
That great Head of the Church, whose earthly prayer 
it was, and whose heavenly will it is, that His may 
be one in Him, even as He is one with the Father, 
He too summons us to defend, as a quality inviolate, 
the unity of His church on earth. Breathing the very 
prayers of saints in successive generations gathered 
into rest — by solemn commemorative fast and festival 
tracing their footsteps in the pathways of the Holy 
One — and thus connecting ourselves with th€ long 



114 CHAPTER IV. 

line of the faithful, is it our lethargy that shall con- 
spire to surrender the Church to the will of her 
enemies, who, dead to the bleeding sorrow wherewith 
Piety contemplates sacrilege, would glory and not 
grieve * to see her in the dust;' — enemies, too, puny 
in consistent ranks, but strengthened now for a fleet- 
ing hour by most unprincipled confederacy : and it is 
ours to behold and to repel this onset of the Voluntary 
System, which, like a huge battering-ram, is levelled 
at the Fortress of our Faith, from the Babel of belief, 
by a motley army, in the concentrated violence of a 
thousand conflicting animosities ! " 

C — Tempora mutanturl Such a change has come 
o'er the spirit of the nation's dream, that the present 
prostration of the antagonistic party seems irrecon- 
cileable with the late vaunt of invincibilitj^ ; and in 
the lull of the aflray we look about us for the groupes 
who were rushing with loud invocations to the idol, 
E-eligious Liberty — a guardian genius if her placid 
lineaments be regarded with reverential eyes, but at 
that time by turbulent zealots followed, sought, and 
sued, as 

" A reeling goddess Avith a zoneless waist.*' 
Like the Indian at his early home, inquiring for the 



COLLOQUY II. 115 

friends of his youtli, we ask after the sectarian chiefs, 
" Where are they? and Echo answers, Where ?^^ 

E. — Woe betide this bonny isle of Britain and 
her manifold dependencies if words had oftener been 
deeds ! * There were many, however, in that alliance, 
in whom the furor of hostility blinded their better 
judgment; for, in a moral war, which that essentially 
should have been, they had not else rejected Prin- 
ciple, which is moral strength, in favor of Union, 
which is physical. — But the veriest tyro in physics 
who ever unwittingly poisoned, or in metaphysics who 
ever floundered in a mental morass, would agree in 
this, that in a raging fever it is not from the victim 
we must expect a timely application of his febrifuge. 
I have no sympathy whatever with sectarianism; and 
the sects which too continually subdivide Christendom 
at the impulse of graceless ambition or pragmatical 
whim — by every subdivision rending that mantle 
which should be seamless and entire—these mushroom 
corps attest in how little fearful regard is held the sin 
of schism. Still, I think that many dissenters of the 
Equality-epoch went not voluntarily into the rough 
arms of Republicanism, nor courted with a consenting 
mind the traitor -kiss of Eome ; rather, that in yielding 
* *' Words are no deeds." — Hen. viii. Sbakspeare. 



116 CHAPTER IV. 

themselves as coadjutors nominally, but, virtually, as 
instruments of the Demagogue and the Devotee, they 
could not discern with how despicable a political and 
objectionable a religious company of freebooters they 
were hail-fellows, badly met. If they did recognise 
their true position, we may conclude that the near 
prospect of a large concession, made compulsory by 
numbers, was too tempting to retreat from at the 
recommendation of Eectitude or the counter mandates 
of pious seceders, deceased or living. To the name 
of Irons it is pleasant to pay respectful tribute: but 
when I think of that general hapless wallowing in 
defilement, and that Puritanism, blind-folded and 
urged on by the designing, should have thus wantonly 
immersed itself in pitch and pollution, I feel (as 
gentle Edmund felt for beauty in tribulation,) that 
^^ all for pity I could die." The professedly-religious 
began the contest with the elements of moral warfare, 
— with argument, and plea, and the protestations of 
Conscience (grown pitiably sore and petulant, by the 
way !) ; but evil communications corrupt, you know ; 
and after the exhaustion of their argumentative am- 
munition, which flashed and did no more, they re- 
sorted to expedients which, if severely scanned, must 
be remembered with scorn; but, regarded with com- 



COLLOQUY II. 117 

passion, suggest merely a comparison with the little 
angers of wayward urchins, who, annoyed by a 
robuster youth, and vexed with the feeling of infe- 
riority, will wreak their harmless ire in hasty ver- 
biage, and hurl promiscuous missiles at him they 
cannot reach. 

C. — " Yonder harlot, throned on the seven hills," 
must have " coined her cheek to smiles" at the co- 
operation of the children of the conventicle, some of 
whose more fastidious fathers repudiated and rejected 
the reformed Church, because of an alleged remaining 
taint of Popery. Kome could not but have waxed 
complacent at the evidence of docility where, of yore, 
was loud and deep defiance. I firmly believe that a 
strong (if not the strongest) general check experienced 
by the movers of that sectarian sedition was the result 
of a conviction pressed upon the public mind, that 
the continued strife for equalisation would ultimately 
tend to promote the designs of never-dormant Rome. 
The doctrine of egalite — either civil or religious — » 
is known by Englishmen to involve an absurd con- 
stitutional anomaly; and though our countrymen are 
" liable to have their understandings played upon by 
unmeaning terms,"* yet, once convinced of error or 
* Paley. 



118 CHAPTER IV. 

fatuity, they are mucli too sensible to persevere in the 
" strenuous idleness" of a chase after chimeras. To 
those who looked forward — who saw events in their 
causes and could ascertain contingencies* — the issue 
of a successful league against the Establishment pre- 
sented itself in the disturbed guise of a temporary 
religious republic, in which energies whose proper 
direction should be dictated by Religion, might be 
seen rapt in the zeal of partisanship and restless 
struggle for pre-eminency. And in this fever of 
aspiring sectaries, it was easy to foresee the stealthy 
form of Popery, with its ready bait, false wile, and 
specious reasoning, winning its unsuspected way over 
minds too jealous of surrounding rivalry to detect 
the not-unpalatable poison of the dissembling Phy- 
sician, or to scrutinise the artful artillery wherewith 
the citadel of Belief is frequently besieged, — a siege 
so cunningly contrived and conducted, that the pro- 
selyte's surrender is often startling to himself, and 
seemingly unreal as " a phantasma or a dream." 

E. — You have alluded to the Church of Pome as 
to a spiritual physician. In palmier days she was, 
in that capacity, most accommodating in her dispen- 
sary, and considerate in her cures: but she insisted 

* Johnson. 



COLLOQUY TI. 119 

on the patient's faith in her all-sufRciency, and virtue 
went not out from her where this credulity was wanting. 
For the rest, she had sonl-salves at all prices — the 
costliest, of course, the most mollifying ; and herbs in 
infinite variety — the bitter for the scrupulous and 
ascetic, and sweeter-savoured for the rich devotionless. 
And in the matter of preparing for an easy purgatorial 
probation, the standing prescription in her pharma- 
copoeia was — The needy, lacerate; the wealthy, joay. 
[The old man's countenance fell.] This was her mode 
of treatment in that drear, dark time, when men had 
lost sight both of Freedom and their bonds ; ere any 
mind enslaved had risen from the stagnant slough, 
resolved to burst the manacles which bound it; ere 
those who sat in darkness had regained any glimpse 
of the " great light" so long occult. Had that light, 
on its slow re-issue from the cloud, burst like a blazing 
meteor on the wide moral wreck, what human mind 
but must have shrunk appalled from the task of that 
wreck's regeneration? — icho have deemed himself 
competent to the mind's cure in that diseased con- 
dition? Yet, in the wise supervision of Providence, 
the dark Hour had its indomitable Man, the Exigency 
its well-equipped Appliance, the monster Falsehood 
his undaunted Foe — a Foe that in the face of scowling 



120 CHAPTER IV. 

Principalities dared designate as infernal the chi- 
canery which had sapped the soul's vitals, eclipsed 
the divine penetration of its eye, and degraded the 
thoughtful allegiance of reason to a spiritless and 
automatic routine. O ! a daring sway was that Church 
of Rome's ! — a dread responsibility, that of her then 
representatives ! 

C. — Dread, indeed, is the accusation against her; 
for her guilt has not simply been the concealment of 
truths divine — she has distorted and deformed them : 
from the lighthouse to which men's souls would, un- 
directed, look for a pure religious ray upon the path 
of their pilgrimage, she suspended a deceptive beacon : 
her goverment was a mystery of iniquity; her cere- 
monies were a meretricious pageant; her calendar 
became a populous mythology; her overthrow was 
a loosing of the prisons to the bound — 

E. — And when Freedom smiled in upon the poor 
succumbent captive, O it is full of interest to imagine 
him uprising from his crouched attitude, and to con- 
ceive the new nerve of delight he felt when, walking 
erect under the clearing firmament, he " saw for him- 
self" a reflex of the Sun of Righteousness gleaming 
on the starry wings of Hope ! But about this bruit 
raised by fault-finders of all creeds, and cavillers 



CHAPTER IV. 121 

of none — that the papacy has conspirators in our own 
priesthood ; that the upas-tree has taken root at home, 
and is actually exhaling its pestilent influence under 
our innocent noses. I have it by oral tale and written 
story, that dreadful things are discovered by those 
who have the gift of construing the countenance of 
Time a little in advance of the events which are to 
stand registered in his furrowed face. Down the 
vista of futurity the ^^er^z-far-sighted distinguish ho- 
nest protestant churchmen aghast at the expose of 
concealed bones of contention of elephantine magni- 
tude ; our dear old Mother in dismay at the desertion 
of her surpliced servants; and pseudo - protestant 
clergymen wrangling for precedency in saluting the 
Pope's toe ! One squeezes a sip of solace, however, 
from the reflection, that predictions in our day are 
not invariably infallible. 

C. — Society is never without a morbid company 
of members, who are ever busy in making troubles 
independently of those they were born to, and whose 
life is an unintermitting " ague-fit of fear." To them 
" of comfort no man speak," rather " of graves, of 
worms, and epitaphs" — - 

E. — Monomaniacal forestallers of grief, who insist 
that twsufiicient for the day is the evil thereof; are 



122 CHAPTER IV. 

over-exquisite in casting " the fashion of uncertain 
evils;"* and receive " comfort like cold porridge." f 
'Tis lamentable that in despite of " saint, sage, and 
sophist," and the painful schooling of Experience, the 
votaries and victims of " squint Suspicion" are so 
many. — But you were observing that — 

C. — These, if they discern or fancy they discern a 
cloud on the horizon's verge,- though it be no bigger 
than a man's hand, foretel a certain and an immediate 
covering of the entire firmament. Nay, there are 
minds so strangely constituted, that they will peer 
many times (if necessary) into the dim distance, in 
quest of that shadowy omen at which, having seen, 
they profess to " sorrow as men without hope." The 
force of prejudice is immense; and " he who would 
leap over the hedges of custom had need be well 
mounted.''^ It is Prejudice which views unwillingly 
the movement going on in the Church — a movement 
almost entirely defensible by the churchman's charter, 
the Book of Common Prayer, and yet inveighed 
against as a symptom fraught with danger. Supple- 
mentary/ and whimsical appendages to the prescribed 
Order may be condemnable, especially if adjuncts to 
ceremonies themselves non-essential and sometime 
* Comiis. t Tempest, ii. 1. X Aaron Hill. 



COLLOQUY II. 123 

disused. Of the thousand tongues of Rumour many 
are set in agitation by ultra-finical precisians; but 
many others are murmuring over a revival most com- 
mendable. Against the prejudices of late and present 
times one might almost as well expect favour for 
Lucifer as for Laud; yet Laud must not be " mistaken 
into vice," or be condemned and dismissed unheard. 
" Ever since I came in place/' he said, at the bar of 
the house of peers, " I have laboured nothing more 
than that the external publick worship of God, so 
much slighted in divers parts of this kingdom, might 
be preserved, and that with as much decency and 
uniformity as might be. For I evidently saw that 
the public neglect of God's service in the outward 
face of it, and the nasty lying of many places dedicated 
to that service, had almost cast a damp upon the true 
and inward worship of God, which, while we live in 
the body, needs external helps, and all little enough 
to keep it any vigour." 

E. — The effort was indisputably laudable; — upon 
the judiciousness of its manifestation opinions differ. 

C. — Those among the clergy who make a principle 

of unity, and who most earnestly strive to enable 

the Church " to realise the daily supervision of her 

children,"* are the most suspected of the priesthood, 

* Bishop of Winchester, j 



124: CHAPTER IT. 

I impute no papistical prepossessions where they are 
vehemently alleged to exist ; and when I meet with 
expressions which the " scandalously nice" adduce as 
evidence of treachery, I lament the unguardedness 
of the learned, who frequently excite suspicion in the 
illiterate, by apparent more than by actual incon- 
sistencies. The man who is familiar with the history 
of the Reformation, must disapprove in part; but it 
arouses the alarm of the ignorant, to hear that event 
reprobated, with which he has been instructed to 
connect the rescue of " pure Religion and undefiled" 
from the prison-house of Popery and the dense at- 
mosphere of long-accumulating Error. But assuming 
that favorers of the Popedom — nay, that apostates are 
at this hour subtly striving to re-infuse Romanism 
into the Anglican faith, by what instrumentality would 
their design be most effectually accomplished ? Would 
it be best promoted by intellectual progression or 
retrogression? Have we of the tiers-etat attained, 
indubitably, an intellectual vantage-ground superior 
to Jesuitical jugglery? — might not the sly sybil whine 
into bondage the compliant multitude? The old 
appliances of persecution and the anathema seem but 
little calculated for a modern taming process. 

E. — Why, as to the mind's retrograde movement 



COLLOQUY II. 125 

the old lady in scarlet and her shaven sons would 
have firstly to close the flood-gates of Literature ; and 
those literary ushers-in and whippers-in, the book- 
publishers, could, " ere a man might say, Behold!'* 
whistle together a tolerably deep-mouthed opposition. 
The meridian might of depraved Rome was co-existent 
with the midnight of the intellect ; — it was over slaves j 
groping slaves, that she held the most arbitrary sway. 
There is not a layman in England who would more 
strenuously advocate a proper docility to the Church 
than would I; yet, I say it solemnly, may God forbid 
our relapsing again into a state of mental prosternation, 
in the imbecility of which it is impossible that He 
can take pleasure. You mention casuistry and per- 
secution among the instruments which, in an impro- 
bable case, the popish priesthood might put in opera- 
tion. When dissenters, who are never chargeable with 
obstinate adherence, tractable lambs ! — when they meet 
humble men of the Isaac Ashford* stamp, who are de- 
termined to walk in the " sober light" of the Church, 
their designation of such character is higot. Now 
with such an innate bigotry towards protestantism 
our countrymen are, I believe, too deeply imbued, to 
imbibe venom, while, from the great Halls of spiritual 

* The Parish Register. 

J 2 



126 CHAPTER IV. 

Medicine, there issue so many keen discriminators 
and denouncers of what is base and surreptitious. 
Then as to persecution — it is a system of policy as 
cruel in its operation as it is eventually fatal to the 
cause which it is intended to serve. Its very inter- 
ference in the promotion of theological unity is a 
sufficient condemnation of the tenets it would advance; 
and yet in this particular field of contention, its exer- 
cise has been at once more sanguinary and self- 
destructive than in any other sphere. It is an equivocal 
instrument in the business of salvation, which slays 
the body because the soul has an objection to be 
saved by means prescribed for it; as he would be 
considered a dangerous physician, who should over- 
come the imbibitions scruples of his patient by the 
administration of a lasting quietus. The swords of 
the magistrate and of the minister are of a contrary 
temperament: allegiance to spiritual authority — real 
soul-coercion — enforced by civil power, may possibly 
be made to assume the semblance of peace — but there 
is no peace. If we ask. What has Force effected for 
(avowedly) a spiritual Religion, we find a reply in 
the defeat of the system : and this result was inevitable ; 
for Barbarism can never be the divinely-accredited 
representative of Benignity, and a process at which 



COLLOQUY II. 127 

our human nature shudders, is little calculated to 
reconcile our divine. And if we seek to authorise 
the cruelty of the agents by the contents of their 
credential, we find the Potentate's command — " Put 
up thy sword into the sheath!" and this rebuke of 
violence to him whose mantle has been claimed as 
the vest of spiritual supremacy, and whose weapon, 
in the unrestrained hands of his successors, has since 
deluged Christendom with gore, in glory of the 
Restorer of Malchus ! 

C — Ay, the records of Rome are too indelibly 
stained with characters which have but one expressive 
meaning through all time, to make the enlargement 
of her sheep-fold a welcome sight to the world. — 
May Heaven preserve mankind from her maternal 
mercies ! The effect of distance is to diminish mag- 
nitude ; and now, in the calm adoption of any creed 
or tenet, we are forgetful of the fiery trials of faith, 
when absolute conformity was enforced by torture. 
Looking back upon this or that crowded scene with 
an eye which a lack of interest enervates or inter- 
mediate objects divert, our vision is vague and dim; 
but let us preserve a special focus and a steady gaze, 
and our emotions of awe and horror become wellnigh 
as acute in the distant retrospection of these atrocities, 
as were theirs who had them in immediate review. 



128 CHAPTER IV. 

E. — The places which should have illumined the 
benighted, were themselves ensepulchred in darkness; 
the declared home of Christianity — about whose por- 
tals, if the heavenly Guest hath indeed her dwelling 
within, are ever hovering the attendant-angels Cha- 
rity, Commiseration, and Mercy — became an " habi- 
tation of Cruelty;" and 

" Victory sickened, ignorant where to rest." * 

Upon human tenderness the tale of her terrible 
triumphs falls freezingly — it acts like ice upon the 
heart. In a little book, brought to me by my god- 
daughter many months ago — the Nun, was it not, 
Mary ? — illustrative of that serious mistake, a monastic 
life, there occurs a recital of the discipline resorted 
to in the case of two sisters, whom the powers of 
darkness had influenced to assert the transcendental 
authority of scripture over tradition. The narrative 
is related by one of the victims, and is invested, in 
many of its details of suffering, with an air of unre- 
pining sufferance and meekness, truly pathetic. — 
No exaggeration of inflictions, nor show of super- 
natural endurance, nor sickly suppliance for sympathy, 
but a dispassionate revelation, bearing on its surface 
* Wordsworth. 



COLLOQUY II. 129 

and in its secrets the impress of authenticity. A 
picture which cannot have failed to excite holy pity, 
is that wherein the exiled nuns are represented in 
a cell, lit by a sad and solitary lamp, and — saving 
the Presence which no barriers may exclude — are 
visited only by a spectral female attendant, cold as 
if carved from alabaster. One is bowed with the 
weight of years and the tyrannies of the holy Mother, 
and is in sickness, and not far from the strange bosom 
of Mercy; the other is occupied in administering 
solace from a purer source than the fountains of 
traditionary record; and over her dungeon-divinity 
time elapses unheeded and unknown: 

" Seasons return, but not to them returns 
Day or the sweet approach of even or morn." 

This loneliness, and ignorance of day and night, 
suggest an idea of desolation, which, if not divinely 
redeemed from despair, would thrill through every 
feeling, as the type of Innocency in eternal abandon- 
ment : as it is. Humanity, incredulous, inquires if such 
recited cruelties can ever have been realised by sen- 
tient beings, and they, too, of the finer-fibred creation! 
Oh, if the accents of oppression ascend fi'om the 
prisons of the bound, and if every wrong has its 



ISO CHAPTER IV. 

regarded cry and its sure avenging, how fearful a 
retribution must be in reserve for these enormities; 
— perpetrated, too, by zealots, whose stony seclusion 
could not shut out the worst part of their nature, while 
it often perverted the best; and whom the incentive 
of an oiFended superstition did sometimes transform 
to furies — in furtherance of the Christian faith ! 

C. — It is not the least of many and great privi- 
leges peculiar to the age in which we live, that 
dread no longer interferes in exercises spiritual ; that 
the scruples of Conscience are respected; and innu- 
merable vagaries, which it would be difficult to affiliate 
to Conscience, are tolerated on the mere assumption 
of that honored but hacknied patronymic. But this 
privilege of exemption from dread, in which all 
classes may and do participate, operates, I apprehend, 
but feebly, as a stimulant to general thankfulness. 
A very large portion of the episcopalian community are 
deficient in this feeling, and " see no beauty, that they 
should desire*' their Church, for her tolerancy to the 
turbulent, and for that soothing strain of hope, which 
refuses to " shut the gates of Mercy," where more 
denunciatory creeds would, sometimes savagely, en- 
throne Despair. As it regards the non-conforming 
body, it is not easy to conceive that thankfulness could 



COLLOQUY II. 131 

very keenly exist in connection with the ubiquity of 
scruple and morbid sensitiveness of conscience which 
prevailed of late. The immunities permitted to sec- 
tarianism by the conciliatory spirit of past ages^ and 
rightly esteemed by their immediate recipients as 
privileges, are declared by their clearer-minded suc- 
cessors to be mockeries — partial ameliorations serving 
only to render all restraint intolerable. A little while 
ago how many malcontents made it their occupation 
to recruit and marshal out a ludicrous squad of civil 
and religious grievances — scarce-apparent pustules at 
the worst, inflated into loathsome moral tumours! — 
Most-cheered the jack-a-lantern martyr who boldest 
bared his arm to show his festering (blue-chalk) scars ; 

E. — And hoisted, not the revolutionary red-cap nor 
the mitred cap episcopal, on a pole chequered with six- 
teen hundred isms, but an " old hat with the humour 
of forty times forty fancies prick't in't." — A duU trope, 
this, and interruptive ; but Will must have liis way. 

C. — The blaze of modern liberalism confuses old- 
established ideas of freedom, and manifests that 
to be tyranny, which not long since was toleration. 
They who had been accustomed to regard Conscience 
as the inflexible reprover of moral obliquity, were 
bewildered at the contrariety of its developments. 



132 CHAPTER IV. 

In the dissentient religious world (with one honorable 
exception,) the strife had ceased to be for correctness 
of creeds — the absorbing aim was closeness of con- 
federacy; and advancing into the political boundary, 
(it was a " narrow bank" and scarcely perceptible that 
separated the two spheres,) the lamb of spiritual 
meekness and the lion of avowed republicanism might 
be seen in most affectionate salutation. The war-cry 
of the heterogeneous host has, however, died away 
in the distance; and to the defeated and dispersed 
tribes is left the sorry— and, let us hope, the salutary 
reminiscence, of an inglorious and 

" Vaulting ambition, which o'erleapt itself.** 

" Whatever," said E. with much seriousness, " may 
be the defalcation of others'' gratitude for the peace 
which now attends the outward practice of Religion, 
our duty is clear. Although by casual discussion 
frequently entrdine, it does not agreeably consort with 
my disposition, to recur to scenes in human history in 
which the actors have played unseemly parts ; but I 
derive the charm of music from the story of good deeds- 
You, who have sternly reprehended the indiscriminate 
enlistment and chameleon-livery of Conscience, might 
frown were I to arrogate her sacred sanction to an 



COLLOQL Y II. 133 

objection I entertain against entering, myself, into 
the survey and the scrutiny of depraved human 
character. I would hardly dare to dignify this un- 
willingness by the designation of" conscientious ;" but 
it is nevertheless strengthened by grave admonitions, 
murmured in Reason's ear, and fortified by this Re- 
flexion Morale of Mme. Deshoulieres : 

" Toujours yains, toujours faux, toujours pleins d'injustices, 

Nous crions dans tous nos discours 
Contre les passions, les foiblesses, les vices, 

Oil nous succombons tous les jours." 

I have often thought upon a saying of Horace "Wal- 
pole age, reverting to a design of Horace Walpole 
jeune; — it not only illustrates aptly, but touchingly, 
the sharp and summary judgment of character which 
the young form; — the calm and clement adjudication 
of the old. '^ In my youth," he says, " I thought of 
writing a satire on mankind ; but now, in my age, I 
think I should write an apology for them. Several 
worthy men, whom I know^ fall into such unexpected 
situations, that to me, who know these situations, their 
conduct is matter of compassion and not of blame." 
Besides, conscious of our passions and their propen- 
sities, we rush into a position we should sedulously 
avoid, in arraigning before ourselves, at a tribunal 



134 CHAPTER IV. 

whose pillars are " based on rottenness," our fellow- 
men, vile though they be : the poor culprit is wont 
so eagerly to usurp the judgment-seat, and — an out- 
lawed criminal himself — proceeds as with clean hands 
to accuse and to condemn! 

" And what were we — frail creatures as we are — 
If the All-merciful should mete to us 
With the same rigorous measure wherewithal 
Sinner to sinner metes?" 

" O, Charity!" continued the good Old Man, with 
still devoiiter and abstracted earnestness,"0 Charity ! 
thou maiden whose chiefest majesty is in thy meek- 
ness, who shrinkest from sapphire thrones to preside 
at the hearths of the humble, and who art the herald 
of all heavenly things! — Celestial Visitant, whose 
proudest banner is the balm, and whose richest trophy 
is peace; — thou that wert the first-born of the children 
of Eternal Love, and that art the joy of seraphs and 
the spirits of the saints ; — Lover of concord, for ever 
inspiring with unity the harps of the angel-band, and 
from " the high and holy place" speaking Peace to the 
sons of men ! — fair Favored One of our Father, God, 
how frail a temple hast thou in our fro ward hearts ! 
When, O benign Spirit! tvhen shall that sterile soil 
become as Eden with the fruits of thy planting? — 



COLLOQrY II. 135 

How long shall we boast that thou hast made thine 
abode in our breast^ and that thou hast therein an 
altar which is inviolate, and that we are at one with 
the vast family of the flesh ; and yet so oft awaken to 
a contest that may not come from thy dwelling, and 
passions that cannot have kindled in thy sanctuary, 
and dark distrustfulness not born of thee — which tell 
us bodingly that thou, white-mantled Maid ! are but 
the rare denizen of our troubled sphere — art still too 
much a stranger to our fallen race. Thou hast tuned 
thy lyre at the eternal Fount, and its burden is 
evermore of glad tidings; but when shall thy feet 
be beautiful upon the mountains, and the mountains 
be made low, that we all may view thy vesture, and 
know thee from the phantom we now vainly clasp, 
by the unsullied love that shall in thought and word 
for ever rise like crystal sparkles from the pure living 
spring within us?" 



COLLOQUY IIL 



A FEW WORDS UPON S H A K S P E A R E, 



COLLOQUY III. 



A FEW WORDS UPOX SHAKSPEARE. 



" Death makes no conquest of this Conqueror; 
For now he lives in fame, though not in life." 

Julius CcBsar. — Shakspeare. 

Hating attained this stage of intimacy and confidence 
with the tenant of Ivy Lodge^ I thenceforth made a 
weekly pilgrimage thither^ with admirable uniformity. 
A lawyer's protestation of disinterestedness is so often 
considered and treated as a matter of levity^ that I 
have long since declined protesting by it^ and do not, 
therefore^ assert for the steady constancy of my moye- 
ments that charm which inflexible regularity derives 
from the evident absence of self-interest. T^'ere I not 
constrained by the consciousness, that a complaint 
urged by so impotent a limb as am I, against that 



140 CHAPTER V. 

gross moral injustice (unfortunately not an indictable 
offence,) which the legal body sustains, in the ceaseless 
suspicion which attaches to the actions and assevera- 
tions of so overwhelming a majority of its members, 
I would certainly labor hard to blow the cruel douht 
in every censorious and contumelious eye, till the 
pains and penalties of ophthalmia should have wrought 
remorse. The moral mischief which has been done by 
" squint Suspicion" is incalculable ; and the chronicles 
of the law would, probably, demonstrate its amount 
more amply and more accurately than those of any 
other profession not under the immediate cognizance 
of the police. Faculties cannot be borne for ever 
meekly, where to the frail bearer is always imputed 
a brow of bronze ; nor can clearness in office preserve 
its immaculacy, exposed to the perpetual stigma of 
collusion. I have been a regretful witness to repeated 
proofs, that virtue, frequently mistaken for vice, has 
been vitiated; and I know members of the profession 
who, had fine feeling not been rendered callous by 
indiscriminate sinister accusations, might even to this 
day, on coming designedly in contact with the dinner- 
table of an unsuspecting country gentleman, have 
disdained to tax him — a non-inviting host — for a 
passing opinion, proffered en mangeant. 



CHAPTER V. 141 

I merely hint, currente calamo, at the injustice of 
returning " Disreputable" as a sentence on lawyers 
en masse, and leave the matter with the law-officers 
of the crown ; trusting that a corrective measure may 
appear feasible, and be announced with the next 
batch of reforms. 

My Ivy-Lodge days were chronologised by white 
stones; oh! very rosy-fronted were those hebdomadal 
hours. Five summer- evenings had I wandered about 
the precincts of the Elder's tranquil habitation, lis- 
tening at times to panegyric, for which a thousand 
objects in his path supplied him with as many themes. 
The effervescence of a thankful heart is always eu- 
phonious, but old age wondrously mellows its effect, 
and E. looked the gratitude he spake : his was no rota- 
tory or conventional phraseology, no goodly outside 
to vacuity, no odious nasal twang signifying nothing, 
but an incontrollable effusion emanating from the 
glad perception of good in everything. Of continuous 
colloquy we had little, or if he " talked the flowing 
hour," I was distrait: under skiey influences the 
luscious Summer insisted on such attentions from eye 
and ear, that garrulity, nathless its melodious flow, 
was outri vailed ; and it was a more delightful avoca- 

k2 



142^ CHAPTER V. 

tion to emulate feminine eulogy, pronounced upon a 
favorite flower, than to extend a patient hearing to 
never-wearied senescence, although enthusiastic. And 
when dear mother Nature threw out Night's vaporous 
reminder that she must have her twilit drop-scene 
down awhile on the fair world, to prepare her Pageant 
of the Constellations, then, within doors, I arrested 
the commencing Elder upon his own confession, that 
" Poetry, however sublime, was never so effective 
alone as when wedded to Music;" so the Godfather 
resigned himself, in attitude attent — a perfect model 
to talkative sires, simple fathers or baptismal, who 
have daughters of delicious note — resigned himself, 
I say, a charmed listener to the rich, soul-appealing 
melodies of Mrs. Hemans; — concords of sweet sound 
entrancing to old men and children, but exceedingly 
perturbing to young men and maidens pledged to the 
principle of celibatic independence. And five nights 
— such nights as make me think the "white-fired 
maiden" in her dotage now, and her retinue dege- 
nerating — five oriental nights had mantled, firstly 
with carmine caught from the sun's adieu, and then 
with the pale hue flooding from the pensive moon, 
that quiet umbrageous retirement, and the Old Man's 
voice had been subdominant, — heard now and then. 



CHAPTER V. 143 

in rapturous comment, in the lull of strains sweet as 
if wafted over violet-beds, but very variously bur- 
dened — now hopeful, now despondent — as the theme 
of song had sprung forth in bright heart-sunshine or 
in its sombrous shadows. 

In this transitory condition, however, we know 
that " nought is lasting;" and mankind are pretty 
Vv^ell agreed that enjojTnent is lamentably short-lived: 
the converse state is. not so ephemeral; indeed, with 
many there is a wofal disproportion between the time 
given them to laugh in and the time allotted them to 
mourn. E. seemed strongly of opinion that there 
was a season for talking as well as a season for singing, 
and on the sixth evening his conduct portended dis- 
cussion. A portly volume of Shakspeare was lying 
open on the table, implying recent perusal of the 
Winter's Tale : the book had been a costly copy of 
the Poet; and a juvenile observer, of a liberal turn 
of mind, might, from its broken back and its innu- 
merable paper-scrap projections, have instantly in- 
ferred that the book's supporting-shelf was a dusty- 
visaged sinecurist. Notwithstanding the fealty which 
every English man and woman owes the Poet- King, 
I would just then have declined paying prosaic tribute 



144 CHAPTER v. 

to any one (always excepting our right-loyally-re- 
garded Lady the Queen), and would still have said, 

" Let rich Music's tongue 
Unfold imagined happiness;" 

but there was a deliberate purpose in the Elder's 
manner which forbade remonstrance; and looking at 
and listening to the earnest Ancient^ I became quickly 
reconciled. Would, only, that I could do his style 
and manner greater justice. 

The Elder, extolling incidentally the exhaustless 
mines of poetic v/ealth which modern publication has 
compressed in waistcoat-pocket editions of Shakspeare 
and Milton, adverted to the master-minds themselves : 

E. — I would shrink abashed from a supposed critical 
stricture on the works of Shakspeare and Milton; 
for, making no pretension to a correct judgment, 
and valuing whatever yields me profitable pleasure 
or leads to the knowledge of myself, fifty years of 
admiration of what I approve as " good," have left 
me neither leisure nor inclination to " argue much 
of evil." But to my uninstructed eye there appears 
a pervading characteristic in the productions of each 
of these illustrious minds, wherein, despite occasional 
aberrancy, we recognise Shakspeare as to this world 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 145 

its proper oracle, and Milton as the oracle of other 
worlds to this. The one, in his delineation of men, 
seems to have ascended on an eagle's wing, and with 
stronger than an eagle's eye to have scanned the 
mazy line of human character to its utmost verge, 
touching, in its remote extremes, the angels vfho keep 
and those who kept not their first estate : — the other, 
aiming at " things unattempted," and advancing into 
s]3heres untrodden, appears to have sped upon the 
pinions of a spirit to the centre of the Triune council, 
and shared in the arcana of the Eternal. Shakspeaxe 
unveils the recess of Passion in man, and traces its 
every gradation, from the depths of the terrihle and 
the vile, to the eminences of the tender and virtuous : 
— Milton assumes a similar sovereignty over spiritual 
worlds, from the profoundest conclave of the apostate, 
to the sublimest concourse of the adoring ; in daring 
ubiquity we find him now an accessary to the designs 
of heaven, and now a revealer of the dark deliberations 
of fiends. Neither Shakspeare, in his universe, nor 
Milton in his, has submitted to limits,, or confines, or 
demarcation; but each reigns in the infinite. And 
as with their several portraitures of life it was ex- 
pedient to connect the scenery and circumstance of 
its exhibition, therefore the visible creation found a 



146 CHAPTER V. 

master-limner in the one, and the regions of the 
glorified and the outcast in the other : and this tracery 
of subordinate objects illustrates to perfection the 
loveliness of the seen, and harmonises well with the 
imagined grandeur of the invisible. 

C. — Around the brow of the most popular of that 
exalted Two, how strenuous and spreading is the 
disposition to weave fresh laurel ! 

E. — Displayed, too, contemporaneously with the 
decadence of the represented drama. The Poet's 
conceptions come not now, or rarely come, " bodied 
forth" in approvable personification; and the Poet's 
page is the almost- exclusive mirror which reflects his 
greatness. Yet therein lies a magnetic influence 
precluding the decay of admiration, — a sovereign 
indestructible influence, of potency " in every clime 
and travel where we may;" for now are the isles afar 
allying themselves in confraternity with the proud 
Isle of his home, to sempiternalise the name and fame 
of Shakspeare ! Nor must there be a withered leaf 
in that Bard's coronal, while the earth has a green 
tree or living flower on its surface, and a living hand 
to cherish and redeck the chaplet! 

C. — Hamlet's ejaculation on his poisoned sire — 

*' Take him for all 
I shall not look upon his like again" — 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 147 

is now become of every-day appropriation, and is not 
therefore any longer the especial elegy of departed 
eminence. But may it not with singular propriety be 
applied to its author ? — emphatically of this Poet, can 
we hope to look upon Ms like again? 

E. — If of this " brief candle," mortal life, the 
" better part be burnt out,"* probability might oppose 
the advent of a Shakspeare secundus ; but that same 
Nature, who " hath framed strange fellows in her 
time,"t endows no man with authority to predicate 
from the past the scope or capacities of her future 
achievements: she caverns the mould of which her 
fantastic creature man is fabricated, too profoundly in 
secret, treasures her substance too " curiously, in the 
lowest parts of the earth," to enable the geologist of 
character, from the analysation of human clay historic, 
to chart out learnedly the substrata of forthcoming de- 
velopments in form of man. However, " no perfection 
in reversion shall have a praise in present,"^: and we 
may diligently devote our praise to excellency which 
our eyes have seen and our hands have handled. 
Yet, the beam of assured belief of heaven, wherewith 
the merciful Creator sustains the anxious creature, — 

* 2 Henry iv. i. 2. f Merchant of Venice, i. 1. 

X Troilus and Cressida, iii. 2. 



148 CHAPTER V. 

a beam which shines brightest upon mortality's ex- 
piring embers, and whose divine consolation and 
guidance cheered the Poet, inspires us also — not 
with the wavering trust of renowned men of old, with 
whom a future life was hypothetical, and whose souls' 
desires for a reunion with seers who had gone before 
were burdened with misgivings — but with " the sure 
and certain hope" of looking ui^oii himself, in Sihettev 
country and under a fairer aspect than that, when, 

" Beaten and chopp'd with tamed antiquity,"* 

William Shakspeare,the mortal, bewailed the marring 
touch of Time. 

C. — The human heart which is the " haunt and 
main region" of every poet's pen, consists of so much 
which, as Wordsworth asserts, is essential to it and 
eternal there, and these inseparable and immutable 
qualities have been so comprehensively and, very 
frequently, so inimitably treated by Shakspeare, that 
Nature, as far as we are able to conceive her capacity 
for illustration, could hardly furnish materials for 
another mind like his, whose empire should be vast, 
and yet natural. In its physiological proportions a 
contracted sphere, in its spiritual attributes a realm 
* Shakspeare. Poems. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 149 

of undefined dilatability, it might of this moral me- 
tropolis of poets, the heart, be said, 

" a crooked figure may 
Attest, in little place, a million;"* 

and Shakspeare seems as if by Xature chosen and 
commissioned as Delineator General of our race, and 
thus supremely delegated, to have gone forth un- 
dauntedly over the expansive and uneven territory 
of the sentiments and passions of mankind. The 
Poet has often availed himself of auxiliary aid, and 
frequently adventui'es, with no deceptive self-reliance, 
beyond the boundary of the natural; but icithin that 
boundary has he left space for a future Shakspeare ; 
— for one who, like his sovereign self, would be 
" cabinned, cribbed, confined," in a kind of colony of 
character ; one to whose discursive disposition it Avould 
be a natui'al and uncontrollable necessity to follow 
in the track of men, wherever Xature dictated? 

E. — Thou art unmindful, O Querist, that Nature, 
of whom thou speakest as in some parts absolute from 
the beginning, is, in other parts, most evanescent. — 
Reveal, I adjure thee, before this, oiu* other auditor, 
after whom it is that well-discerning AVill hath, by 
* Henry v. Chorus. 



150 CHAPTER V. 

the moutli of Hamlet, designated Frailty ;* and then, 
admire the fitness of a feminine appellative for that 
volatile Dame, whom thy imagination doth mistakenly 
picture as an antique quakeress, clad in unvarying 
russet, fashioned in starched propriety, and vested 
with perdurability. Thy device savoureth too much 
of demureness, friend! Believe it, Nature, though 
turned of her six thousandth year, is not a straight- 
laced, crimp-bodiced grandam, of orders grey; — alas 
for manifold goodmen whom it painfully concerneth, 
doth she not, — lacking that staidness which might be 
expected iu a mother of millions, — doth she not by 
example countenance, in mothers of units and of tens, 
an itching after new apparel? Pardon this levity, 
most grave and reverend Signor, but the excessive 
gravity of your latter interrogation too much o'er- 
tasked my imperturbability; but know, that with a 
personage ycleped Folly, in a play of Ford,t I might 
truly say, " I love not any whom I laugh not at : pretty 
strange humour is't not?" and you might properly 
reply, with a certain Raybright, " To any one that 
knows you not, it is." You suspect the capability 
of Nature to furnish illustrative material for another 

* " Frailty, thy name is Woman!" Hamlet, i. 2. 
t The Sun's Darling, i. 1. 



A FEW WORDS UfON SHAKSPEARE. 151 

Shakspeare, the first having so comprehensively dealt 
with the permanent passions of the mind; yet the 
process of time, which may not materially alter essen- 
tial attributes, continually diversifies their develop- 
ment ; and in the changed aspect we sometimes fail to 
recognise the individual. The constituent parts of a 
kaleidoscope are identically the same in each of its 
fortuitous conformations; but the effect of the least 
commotion is manifested by a changed figure. The 
word which better than any other characterises our 
condition, is progression ; and Coriolanus, when he 
thus accuses a fickle mob, 

" With every minute you do change a mind,"* 

supplies the whole world with a text on instability. 
In these mundane mutations the poets find their 
" occupation;" and perhaps it is matter for rejoicing 
that these mutations are not few or far between, sup- 
posing that Nature were to always have her quiver 
full of minstrel-children: monotony, Sir, must have 
made them warble in a flat key; things would have 
died in description and looked dusky in song; detail 
must have engendered eiinui by disgusting minuteness. 
Poor Nature herself would have had to endure an 
* Coriolanus, i. 1. 



152 CHAPTER V. 

inquisition, her inquisitors being her own infants; and 
they being often " gravelled for lack of matter/'* the 
old gentlewoman's hairs must, metaphorically, have 
all been numbered. What a weary session would 
impatient man have had, before a faded drop-scene ! 
But since our lot is cast where all are at once spec- 
tators of and actors in a revolving panorama, tedium 
is not; and now, exempted from " dropping buckets 
into empty wells," or giving superfluous coatings to 
previously -painted lilies, ceaseless configurations sup- 
ply fresh materiel for the Poet, who can with reason 
only murmur when 

" Change grows too changeable — without being new." 

The fitful Shelley — a " wandering star," sometimes 
obscure, at others, coruscating with intense brilliancy 
— has written so beautifully on this fertile theme, 
that, like a sweet, sad strain ^Eolian, sweeps over 
one's memory his wail upon 

" MUTABILITY. 

" We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon ; 

How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, 
Streaking the darkness radiantly ! — yet soon 

Night closes round, and they are lost for ever: 

' m> - 

* As You Like it, iv. 1. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHARSPEARE. 153 

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings 
Give various response to each varying blast, 

To whose frail frame no second motion brings 
One mood or modulation like the last. 

We rest — a dream has power to poison sleep: 

We rise — one wandering thought pollutes the day: 

We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep. 
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away : 

Tt is the same I — For, be it joy or sorrow, 

The path of its departure still is free: 
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow, 

Naught may endure, save Mutability." 

The last line has passed into a proverb^ and involves 
a paradox. But to sail back again into the luminous 
wreathy wake of the Swan: — while circumstance 
changes^ character will change ; and vice tersd if man 
be a thing superior to '^ the beasts that perish;" and 
he to whom the Desert hath its divinity will ever 
find its " pools fdled with water" — he who hath 
received the true afSatus will never fruitlessly invoke 
the ^Nluse^ so long as. day by day. unprecedented feats, 
fancies, and frailties provoke the exclamation — 

" Can such things be, 
Without our 57)ec/a/ wonder?"* 

Midway between the creator and the copyist there 
* Macbeth, iii. 5. 



154 CHAPTER V. 

is a ground which Shakspeare nobly occupies : I mean 
by his creations those of his productions which are 
altogether or chiefly ideal, and by his copies such as 
are representations of individual character; but it is 
to his art of conformation that I allude as to a central 
ability; — his skill in selecting from the varied soil 
of humanity, portions of clay of diverse color and 
consistency, but human nevertheless and therefore 
congruous, and then fabricating these elements into 
man or woman with such facile grace and consum- 
mate verisimilitude, that — the ecstasy of admiration 
having in a measure subsided — we ask, with such 
surprise as the knowledge of his measureless power 
to charm permits, 

" What impossible matter will he make easy next?"* 

C. — A Quarterly Reviewer has helped us to com- 
prehend the function to which you allude: he says 
of the mind of Shakspeare, that it was as " a magic 
mirror, in which all human nature's possible forms 
and combinations were present, intuitively and in- 
herently; not conceived, but as connatural portions 
of his own humanity." 

IE,. — Would it be just — could admiration so consent 
* Tempest, ii. 1 . 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 155 

to dwarf the attributes of Eoyal William Shakspeare, 
as to admit, that where he did not create he copied f 
Was it among women, to the extremest degree " un- 
certain — hard to please," that he found the original 
complete of witching Rosalind? — well, by the way, 
for the peace of all ye gallants under forty, that 
Rosalinds are rarcB aces ! Was it after " a child of 
our grandmother Eve, a female ; or for our more sweet 
understanding, a icoman"* that he drew, in all its 
ultra-amazonian proportions, the helpmeet of Macbeth? 
But apart alike from creation and from conformation, 
and where the Poet may be said to have drawn from 
a definite design supplied by Nature, even here do 
we not involuntarily acknowledge, as our eye is 
arrested at one or other of the master-strokes where- 
with his pages abound, 

" It is the witness still of excellency !"t 

C. — His pages do, indeed, abound with treasures. 
It is not with Shakspeare as with others, illustrious 
in poetic annals, whose gems are comparatively rare 
and sometimes cumbrously imbedded; in Shakspeare 
their " sensible, warm motion," is everywhere percep- 
tible : we have not far to follow the Rowings of Ms most 

* Love's Labour Lost, i. L f Much Ado about Nothing, ii. 3. 

I. 



156 CHAPTER V. 

potent pen, before the heart pauses with dread or 
hurries on with delectable emotion. Were ever the 
glowing oiFspring of Imagination so profusely gene- 
rated, and seemingly so inadvertently? — the giving 
" a local habitation" to a thousand thronging children 
of his fancy, appears to have no more impoverished 
his resources than does the ceaseless current of a 
mountain-spring exhaust its source. It is the question 
of a celebrated living writer,* in reference to the 
Poet's mental fecundity, " If Shakspeare had lived 
till now, could he have exhausted his ideas?" 

E. — Of a verity, never, never were orient pearls 
so much at random strung, as by Immortal William ! 
How is it that, in speaking of this Giant among the 
Great, and with voices, too, touched with veneration, 
we dare to syllable his deathless name, as though we 
were his comrades or his friends? Is there witchery 
in William which John has not? or, as we regard 
in their works the Poetic Potentates thus severally 
distinguished, is our attachment — to one, impetuous; 
to the other, timorous in its advances — biassed by 
known distinctive idiosyncrasies? Necker avowed 
himself thunderstruck with the familiarity of certain — 
perfumed dilettanti, we may suppose — who spoke of 
* Bulvver* 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 15T 

their Pascal, their Corneille : Pascal, illustrious in the 
high-priesthood of Piety, was candidate for a more 
incorruptible crown than the Muses' ; but of a greater 
than Corneille, I — nay toe, we British-born, a " band 
of brothers" in our heart-homage to that Compatriot 
who hath no compeer — we talk of him as of an elder 
brother, for we feel that his noble nature would have 
scorned no fellowship which the traits of that same 
noble nature had prompted in honest bosoms. His 
pen, the pregnant channel of poetic thought, con- 
tinually wins you to the Poet, who carries admiration, 
and affection with it, by coups-de-grace as from a 
fairy's finger. How the Elf — rest his manes ! — went 
in and out too, and circumambulated, and scaled, and 
descended, and did as he pleased with, that complex 
and, to the many, inscrutable structure, the Womanly 
Heart! Needing no guide but his genius, nor any 
licence but the general commission you j^ist now 
spoke of, he entered it as a lord his chateau, saun- 
tered lovingly about its corridors, read many a strange 
writing on its walls, saw spectacles — how varied! — • 
in its many chambers, and peering into its penetralium 
or magazine perceived, or says he did — the demoiselle 
may tell us if he fibs : — perceived how puzzling and 
unimagined , is its artillery and modes of action and 

t. 2 



158 CHAPTER V. 

strategy, and how that wordy weapons, sharp as very 
swords, are sometimes softer than butter in their secret 
meaning. Yet, when he follows the current of his own 
generous heart's impulses, how high sentiment, noble- 
heartedness, and " the soul of gentleness," pour out, 
as at flood-gates, into Shakspeare's Conceptions of 
Woman! He will tickle you, or as many as have 
not quite forgotten themselves to stone, when he re- 
moves from the busy hive some dark sliding-panes, and 
discloses la grande passion in some of its machinations 
— and love is a lugubrious business without laughter ; 
— ^but as he reveals its silent, abstracted, and devouter 
workings, he will have you do as he himself does, 
" with gentle hand, touch," for it is an holy thing. 
And then, knowing with all its lofty virtue its inhe- 
rent weakness, with what finely barbed and feathered 
arrows does he besiege the fortress of feminine love ! 
At this present our colloquial apparatus is hardly 
enough unstrung for pathos, and we turn in preference 
to the whirling flight of blufl" Harry's blunted cloth- 
yard. 'Tis said that Dr. Johnson would rather have 
dispensed with King Will's exhibition of bold King 
Harry the Fifth, in forma proci; but the lion of 
Bolt-court sleeps, and inferior animals may therefore 
more freely disport in '^ that Realm of Opinion which 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 159 

no law can reach."* I would not yet exchange that 
sang froid suit of Harry for a hundred specimens of 
more rarified sentimentality : 'tis a unique and incom- 
parable exposition of a brave^ burly Briton, who 
would " die, 'tis true ; but for love, by the Lord, no !" 
Certes, after Will's crayon that Conqueror out of his 
corslet is " the best king of good-fellows ;" and many 
thanks to the Warwickshire Wizard for a peep at 
fond-heartedness under " a stubborn outside and 
aspect of iron." 

'• I speak to thee plain soldier. — And while thou liv'st, dear Kate, 
take a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy ; for he perforce must 
do thee right, because he hath not the gift to woo in other places : 
for these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into 
ladies' favours — they do always reason themselves out again. What ! 
a speaker is but a prater ; a rhyme is but a ballad ; a good leg will 
fall ; a straight back will stoop ; a black beard will turn white ; a 
curled pate will grow bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will 
wax hollow : but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon, or, 
rather, the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright, and never 
changes, but keeps his course truly. And what say'st thou then to 
my love? Speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee." 

Kate asks her royal father's master a natural question : 
" Is it possible dat I should love the enemy of France?" 

and, for her patriotism alone, deserved better things 
* Bulwer. 



160 CHAPTER V. 

from Hal's hands than this indigestible morceau of 
perplexity : 

" No; it is not possible that you should love the enemy of France, 
Kate : but in loving me you should love the friend of France ;ybr / 
love France so well, that I will not imrt with a village of it; I will 
have it all mine; and, Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, 
then yours is France, and you are mine." 

Then Katherine la plus helle: 

" / cannot tell vat is daf." 

And when, at last, the " divine deesse'' finds the plain 
soldier irresistible, and surrenders, provided " it shall 
please le roy son pere/' Harry Plantagenet's portrait- 
painter displays a conquering sovereign's smile with 
great significancy: 
" Nay, it will please him well, Kate; — it shall please him, Kate." 

To return again to Shakspeare general. Never 
was there a pioneer who marched by a less circuitous 
route to the heart's core, or with equal facility recorded 
its mazy workings and windings serpentine. He 
possessed a passport — a singular privilege of entree — 
of permanent validity, in virtue of which he dived to 
the springs of human action, though they were deeper 
by fathoms than the love of Rosalind;* and though 
a host of heart-interpreters have sounded and reported 

* As You Like it, iv. 3. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 161 

these hidden springs, whose reports have often been 
enveloped in obscurity well-nigh profound as the 
springs themselves, yet list to mighty Will, and you 
have their most lucid exposition, deepest meaning, 
truest import. Familiar with the world within world, 
7nan, as with the hornbook of his infancy, 

" Turn him to any cause of policy, 
Tlie gordian knot of it he will unloose 
Familiar as his garter." 

You alluded to the multiplicity of poetical beauties 
which distinguish the page of Shakspeare, and to the 
inadvertency with which they are dispersed. Nu- 
merically, they are, indeed, a lovely legion; and in 
their careless, unstudied disposition, resemble 

•' a forest-bank in Spring, 
All flushed with violets and anemones." 

Are there anij stores like unto "Will's, from which 
admirers, entering with a cacoetlies excenpendi, return 
so laden with goodly proofs of Genius, Fancy, Wis- 
dom ? Open the massy volume of that 

" Bear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame," 

and over every of its prolific pages may we not each 
eagerly exclaim, with Fortinbras, 

" I have some rights of memory in this kingdom!" * 

* Hamlet, last scene. 



16^ CHAPTER V. 

It is not possible satisfactorily to specialise beauty, 
where, as in tbat teeming treasure-house, the Works 
of Shakspeare, its developments are innumerable as 
to the eye of childhood appear the stars of heaven. 
The casual quotation of passages from his works I 
dislike, though Coleridge, in asserting Shakspeare's 
unrivalled excellence, stated that " proof positive" 
of that pre-eminency would be afforded by such a 
criterion: but the plan is objectionable; if the gem be 
estimable it should retain its author's setting. I 
tolerate no vagrancy here, (continued E. laughingly, 
laying his hand on the volume before him,) not even 
vagrant admiration: nay, I would conceal air-guns 
among these priceless leaves, that should explode 
upon fingers filching for Excerpta. Seriously — (you 
may say to me, as Goneril to her poor old father, 

" As you are old and reverend, you should be wise*") — 

seriously, then, is it satisfactory to turn Memory 
adrift here, like a cockle-boat on a shoreless sea? is it 
not better far to sail leisurely round these flowery 
coral rocks, — to float slowly and admiringly over 
beds of gleaming pearl? 

C — While your faculty of speech is recruiting 
* King Lear, i. 4. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 163 

strength, I frankly plead guilty of trespassing and 
poaching, against the statute you would establish. 
The Ivy Lodge quota of luxurious leisure is not, be 
it remembered, common to many; and in that one 
volume there is, to those to whom reading is a relax- 
ation from the toil of life, " the labor of an age in 
piled" leaves. A casual spoil of yesterday I found 
in an expression of Goneril's father : 

" O, how this mother swells toward my heart! 
Hysterica passio ! down, thou climbing sorrow. 
Thy element's below I"* 

In this exclamation there is a remarkable example 
of the rhetorical figure, prosopojpcoia : 

" Down, thou climbing Sorrow!'* 

It woidd be difficult to adduce many instances in our 
tongue of personification more terse and emphatic; 
yet on the Poet's page it occurs but as an ordinary 
ebullition of the passionate Lear ; — there is no flourish 
of trumpets in its neighbourhood, announcing that a 
king was about to make a right royal use of language. 
But the utter absence of oratorical ostentation is one 
especial characteristic of this voluminous author. 

* King liCar, ii. 4. 



164 CHAPTER V. 

E. — O! what ineffable modesty may be beholden 
here, in union with transcendent majesty! — what 
wondrous ownership of almost superhuman genius, 
and entire abstinency from pretension ;— the giant's 
strength, exercised with girlish gentleness. Heard 
you ever this Poet, who, if inexhaustible versatility 
of mind might be allowed to justify self-complacency, 
might have lorded it as the Emperor of Egotists — 
yet where he himself may be suspected of the parole, 
heard you ever a prelude or coda to a passage how- 
soever grand or brilliant, which could be detected in 
resolving into " I am Sir Oracle?" Is not the tenor 
of the Poet's personal plea, 

" Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts :" 

Was he not speaking for himself, when " admired 

Miranda" accounted modesty the jewel in her dower? 

Mark, and inwardly digest, this speaking picture from 

the Winter's Tale, of feeling too intense for words: 

the king Leontes receives intelligence of his long-lost 

daughter, and the scene is with the king and an 

attached lord. 

" There was speech in their dumbness — language in their very 
gesture : they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed or one 
destroyed : A notable passion of wonder appeared in them ; but the 
wisest beholder, who knew no more than seeing, could not say if 
the importance were joy or sorrow ; but in the extremity of (he one 
it must needs be." 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 165 

The allusion to a cause of wonderment so grand as 
the loss or rescue of a world, sheds an halo of solemnity 
over this picture, which, as it essays to portray the 
intensity of paternal emotions, does not shock re- 
ligious feeling by irreverent misplacement. But let 
us turn from the painting, to the artist. Has he 
reserved this description for the pomp of royal reci- 
tation? — has he allotted it to the humblest even of 
his heroes ? Nay, it comes from one of the dramatist's 
third-class personce, a gentleman j — one of the true 
Shaksperian school, though, who is not " loth to cast 
away his speech, having taken great pains to con it,"* 
but who prefaces this unlabored and exquisite recital 
with the apologetical assurance, 

" I make a broken delivery of the business." 

C — The patient endurance of Hermione, queen 
of Leontes, in that same play, has always appeared to 
me an admirable exemplification of a noble woman's 
deportment under the keenest anguish known to virtue 
— the suspicion of it^ fidelity. In seasons when in- 
tense feelings rush into the heart like converging and 
convulsive waves, drowning its utterance, the erje 
frequently supplies a timely conduit from the swelling 

* Twelfth-Night, i. v. 



166 CHAPTER V. 

flood. No " holy moisture," however, relaxes the 
tense, tearless suiFerings of Hermione; and in the 
place of that fluent relief to and eloquent advocate of 
speechless Sorrow, we have the moving protestation 
of vilified Innocency : 

*' Good my lords, 
I am not prone to weeping-, as our sex 
Commonly are, the want of which vain dew 
Perchance shall dry your pities ; but I have 
That honourable grief lodged here, which burns 
Worse than tears drown V* 

E. — A seeming echo from the inmost hall of Grief ! 
but of grief so uninterpretable, that in listening to 
those excellent accents of an injured Woman's woe, 
we may be said to incline our ear but to a parable. 
The misery of Hermione is of no oral kind ; — it must 
be borne incommunicably because it cannot be told: 
and as it is the privilege of woman's nature to be 
susceptible of a finer because more sinless order of 
joy than man's, is not more poignant woe, alas! its 
contingent penalty? It is an occasional effect of 
the excess of sorrow to torpify the mind's emotions ; 
and we owe to Maturin this graphic delineation of 
such an efifect: 

* Winter's Tale, ii. 2. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 167 

" Her cheek of youth was beautiful, 
Till withering- sorrow blanch'd the bright rose there: 
But Grief (lid lay his icy finger on it. 
And chill'd her to a cold and joyless statue." 

But ill Hermione there is a confiict of strong passions 
which prevents her acute anguish from lapsing into 
lethargy. For it is the agony of one grand affection 
which soonest subsides into stupor; — the violence 
of an isolated passion which, from a state of perilous 
perturbation, declines to passiveness: in Hermione 
it is not solely the scorned wife who suffers wrong; it 
is also the loving mother, from whom her babe is torn, 
and she left desolate in her degradation. And well 
might her unweeping bosom hum with its parching 
burthen of " honorable grief!" — sad spectacle to the 
imagination, a woman's breast made thus a battle- 
field for conflicting calamities — subjected, not to the 
rapid outrages of a dismantling march, but to the 
scorching fury of a lasting strife ! 

C. — Although few of us resemble Geneveve* in 

preferring songs whose burden is grievous rather than 

joyous, there is a grandeur in the grief of Hermione 

which we contemplate admiringly, as the enthusiastic 

* In Coleridge's lines on " Love." 



168 CHAPTER V. 

artist the fascinating features of a chef-cVoeuvre. It is, 
in truth, a study, the character of Hermione, of Sorrow 
majestic in mould and symmetry: — how different in 
the sanctity of her distress is this cruelly-divorced wife, 
to the clamorous widow Constance ! Hermione long- 
ing for her father's presence in her tribulation, " for 
pity, not revenge;" Constance, in boisterous impre- 
cation — 

E. — Call the expression of that ardent Mother's 
heart vehement, not boisterous. Count it pragmatical 
if you will, but I interpose an objection to " clamour " 
also, as descriptive of the energy of an anguished 
mother's love — and it is from anguished love that the 
fervor, sometimes the fearful fervor, of Constance 
derives its prime impetus. Ah ! that maternal instinct, 
which dwells in many mothers as a profound affection 
seldom seen in strife, is in Constance developed in 
the throe and paroxysm of quick passion; her heart 
is as it were a volcano, whence, mingling with the 
anathemas of indignant wrong, her mother's love 
gushes like terrific torrents of lava, and you wonder 
that her bosom is not burned by its indwelling fire. 
O, but a mystery of mysteries is, in the abstract, a 
Mother's love ! of many human feelings unfathomable. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 169 

tlie most fathomless. Well affirms one who knew its 

intensity, 

" There is none — 
Tn all this cold and hollow world — no fount 
Of deep, strong-, deathless love, save that within 
A Mother's heart !" * 

I protest that in all the copious chronicles which tell 
us of the heart's purest sensations and sympathies, I 
hear no low but thrilling tones of 

" The still, sad music of Humanity," 

which move me more mightily than does this Beauty 
of History, told, I fancy, with greater pathos in the 
French tongue than in ours : its brief exordium like- 
wise justifies recital: 

" Quelle plume pourroit peindre toutes les scenes 
de douleur ou de joie qui se passent dans le sein 
d'une mere! Qui pourroit decrire ses tendres sol- 
licitudes pour I'objet de sa tendresse; ses allarmes, 
ses agitations, lorsqu'elle est en danger de le perdre; 
son desespoir lorsqu'elle I'a perdu? La femme d'un 
noble Yenitien, ayant* vu mourir son fils unique, 
s'abandonnoit aux plus cruelles douleurs : un religieux 
tachoit de la consoler. — ' Souvenez-vous,' lui disoit-il, 

* Mrs. Hemans. 



170 CHAPTER V. 

' du patriarche Abraham, a qui Dieu commanda de 
plonger lui-meme le poignard dans le sein de son fils, 
et qui obeit, sans murmurer. ^Ah! mon reverend 
pere/ repondit-elle, ' Dieu nauroit jamais commande 
ce sacrifice a une mereV " 

C. — Nor would any but a mother's heart have 
suggested the impossibility of God's requiring such 
a sacrifice. How many tender tales are told of ma- 
ternal love, the most unquenchable and unselfish of 
the affections; and often how unrequited is it by the 
object of its solicitude — solicitude which, in its quality 
of long-sufferance, is of all human properties the near- 
est of kin to the divine attributes of pitying patience 
and freeness to forgive; to the marvellous tenacity of 
maternal above all other tenderness it belongs, to live 
on through despisal and rejection and long acquaint- 
ance with grief. Shakspeare, in Lear, has made the 
maddened king invoke a malediction upon Goneril, 
which, dire in its import, affords proof of the un- 
bounded degree in which the Poet was conversant 
with the anatomy of the moral feelings, and with their 
respective vulnerability to the -shafts of Calamity: 

" Turn all her mother's pains and !>enefits 
To laughter and contempt; that she may feel 
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
To have a thankless child !" 



A ^yORD EN PASSANT TPON MRS. HEMANS. 171 

Of those who have most touchingly depicted the 
heayen-moulded lineaments of maternal love, con- 
spicuous is the Poetess whose affirmation of a mother's 
heart being the sole earthly fount of deathless love 
you just now repeated. " Unused albeit to the melt- 
ing mood/'* I remember well, that on fii'st reading 
her lines entitled ^' Flowers and Music in a Room of 
Sickness/' — 

E. — " Build there, carpenter; the air is sweet !"t 

C. moist symptoms of " my mother came into 

mine eyes/' and " made me play the woman. "+ " It 
is impossible/' remarked an eloquent preacher whom 
I recently heard, " it is impossible to possess without 
grief, if not without passion/' and it does indeed 
appear ine^dtable to the abode of pure Love, if im- 
petuous, that Sorrow also should have joint possession. 
No light or easy yoke was that of the Affections to 
this most passible poetess, with whose lay of love 
there ever mingled an " imder-music of lament:" the 
tears of her love and sorrow " flow into one another 
like crystal rivers," which bear along an ark magni- 
ficent, from whence proceeds awhile the voice of 
repining, anon of resignation, and then of rapt anti- 
cipation. Her allusions to the land which " Sorrow 

* Othello, V. 2. t Troilus and Cressida, iii. 2. X Hen. viii. iii. 2. 



172 • CHAPTER V. 

and Death may not enter/' are, for the most part, 
glowing images of beatitude; and her spirit's com- 
munings with its Source, though differently reported, 
have much of the impressive and august grandeur of 
the Night Thoughts. You will remember Lilian, 
checking the hopeful Mother when she would cheer 
her child with the promise of again gladly " going 
forth with the day-spring:" 

" Hope it not ! 
Dream it no more, my mother! — there are things 
Known but to God and to the parting soul 
Which feels his thrilling summons." 

Over many of her paintings there is the mingled 
gorgeousness and sadness of an autumnal eve. There 
is a melancholy interest in the meditation of those 
" mantling shadows" that in their density sometimes 
shut out from her sight Faith's beckoning finger and 
Hope's radiant smile : true, in the eternal field of stars 
the brightest planet may be temporarily eclipsed ; but 
a vision like hers, divinely fostered, could not long be 
darkened by the April-cloud of Life or the Winter- 
cloud of Death; and as she advanced nearer to the 
Everduring Spring, it is the gladness of a triumph to 
know that 

" hour by hour her soul's dissolving shroud, 
Melted to radiance like a silvery cloud." 



A PASSING COMMENT UPON YOUNG. 173 

E. — The Muse awarded to Mrs. Hemans a plume 
from the loveliest of the bh'ds of Paradise, before the 
plumage had suiFered by the Fall; but how those 
deep, melodious tones of hers, were ever echoing the 
requiem of Innocence, departing from the stricken 
scene of her dethronement, when entered 

" Sin into the world, and all our woe." 

Now, however, hath she and Sorrow sundered their 
alliance, and her lyre hath forgotten its " broken 
music" since the freed Minstrel attained the apothe- 
osis of her brilliant earthly song — 

" Where fiery passion-clouds have no abode, 
And the sky's temple-arch o'erflows with God."* 

You just now mentioned the Night Thoughts, in 
remarking upon one of the rich veins in the mine 
of melody bequeathed to us by Mrs. Hemans — I mean 
that elevated tone in which she dilates on Life, and 
Death, and Immortality. Reverting for a moment to 
Young, — how impressively has that deep Thinker on 
those tremendous themes portrayed that momentous 
junction of life with death, to the realisation of which 
each one, in his own person, is surely but reluctantly 

* Despondency and Aspiration. 

m2 



174 CHAPTER V. 

advancing. Among much that may be turgid and 
bombastic in the Thoughts of Young, there are also 
startling outbursts of language, wherein the heaven- 
aspiring soul speaks vernacularly, — ebullitions of the 
overwrought and struggling spirit, which have no 
sympathy with the parade of words that may precede 
and follow, and which must not suffer deterioration 
by the suspicion of such a sympathy: it would be 
unjust to the Poet, and unprofitable to ourselves, to 
confound those fruitful oases with the quagmires by 
which they are not seldom surrounded. For my own 
part, I only perceive the Poet in these significant 
places — only recognise his voice when oppressed and 
dwarfish faculties seem to have been long grappling 
with gigantic meaning, and to have broken suddenly 
into almost-superhuman utterance. His grand con- 
ceptions wrestle in manacles as it were, till their 
moment of mental manumission, and then the Poet's 
spirit really " speaks with his tongue." I adverted to 
Young's delineation of the " union redoutable de la 
mort et de la vie.^^* We may survey many galleries 
of poetic and prosaic pictures without lighting upon 
a representation of man going down to silence and 
the dust, more graphic than this : — 

• Madame de Stael. 



A PASSING COMMENT TPON YOUNG. 175 

" Life's little stage is a small eminence, 
Inch-high the grave above— that home of man 
Where dwells the multitude : we gaze around, 
We read their monuments — we si§^h — 
And while we sig-h we sink, and are what we deplore; 
Lamenting or lamented all our lot." 

There is no waste of canvas or color here — but how 
effective is the painting ! 

In the Night Thoughts of Young, the Poet often 
contemplates and sometimes confronts the Last Enemy ; 
and over the pages which record this spectral inter- 
course there hovers a weird influence — a charnel- 
house effect — a gaunt semi-reality of the sable Foe, 
which, if it be all but unsubstantial shadow, does never- 
theless " feelingly persuade us what we are."* Young 
summons " spirits fi'om the vasty deep/' and, more 
potent than Glendower,t they come at his bidding, 
and at their approach we involuntarily " commune 
with our hearts, and are still." Many other Poets 
have likewise reported ghostly meditation upon death 
as conditional, and ghostly converse with Death as 
personal; and in Shakspeare — who not only pursued 
the vicissitudes of life to the grave and gate of death, 
but returned with the spirit to assert its wrongs — 
in his unfailing phrase-book of all our human feelings, 
* As You Like it, iU L i* 1 Henry iv. iii. L 



176 CHAPTER V. 

we find frequent and earnest conjectures upon that 
condition to which we approximate, whose secrets 
man learns only when he ceases to be mortal. And 
these conjectures are conceived in various terms of 
doubt or definite expectancy, correspondent to the 
degree in which vague surmise or assured faith pre- 
vailed in the individual conjecturing. Yet, whether 
the soul be left to wander through an uncharted 
universe at the dictate of its untaught, voluntary im- 
pulses, or whether it be guided by precepts which 
cannot err, and which for ever point to a resting-place 
encircled by rivers of joy, — yet does the immortal 
soul, a conscious Renegade from Innocency, recoil 
from its last Retreat: 

" The wide, th' unbounded prospect lays before us. 
But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it."* 

Dread instinct, which trembles at the barrier that 
separates us from bliss ; but dread beneficently per- 
petuated, to restrain the religious from impatience, 
the rash from precipitancy. Alas! alas! were not 
man's Creator his Controller also, how many unpre- 
pared creatures would, in fanatic or romantic fervour, 
have hurried from the hallucinations or danced from 
* Cato. Addison. 



A FEW WOKDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 177 

the delights of this world, to the instant and inter- 
minable destiny of the next ! 

C. — (After a pause.) — The famous soliloquy in 
Hamlet is, probably, Shakspeare's -grandest ideal of 
the Divine Instinct, contemplating the withdrawal 
of its corporeal temple — of the Soul, in hushed inex- 
plicable wonderment at what may follow the dread 
sundering-stroke of Death : 

" To die ; to sleep — 
No more ! and by a sleep to say we end 
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks 
That flesh Is heir to — 'tis a consummation 
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die — to sleep : 
To sleep ! — perchance to dream ! Ay,, there's the rub : 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 
When we have shuffled oflF this mortal coil, 
Must giTe us pause I" 

But all such questionings are most definitively an- 
swered at the bar of Conscience, on the challenge of 
Truth ; and Shakspeare has arraigned at that tribunal 
crimes so various in magnitude, and reported mental 
conflicts so multifarious, with a pen of such personify- 
ing power, that in entering upon the subject with 
him, " the world is all before us," and — 

E. — Therefore will we choose a momentary place 
for parlance— not rest, for in the soil couches an 



178 CHAPTER V. 

earthquake — only a momentary contemplation of one 
conscience in revolt — murderous Macbetli's. When 
I think of the thronged hades of spectral horrors 
whereby the Poet has illustrated Macbeth's mind, I 
am sensible of an inclination to the perpendicular in 
" each particular hair" of the scanty remnant left to 
me ; yet start not thou, meek Maiden ! for knowing 
not " the doctrine of ill-doing,"* little canst thou 
comprehend the torture that e'en here treads hard on 
Guilt ; — unimaginable to thy timidity is the cowardice 
begot by Crime. 

" One cried, * God bless us!' and ' Amen!' the other, 
As they had seen me with these hangman's-hands : 

/ could not say ' Amen' 
When they did say ' God bless us !' 

Lady Macbeth. — Consider it not so deeply. 

Macb. — But vjherefore could not I pronounce * Amen?' " 

Ah! Mr. C, were all our designs invariably referred 
to the court of equity that sits within; — were the 
representative of Justice untampered with, and its 
decrees made absolute in our actions, soon would shoals 
of a certain species of fish — by some naturalists called 
the land-shark — offend by stagnancy the air at West- 
* Winter's Tale, i. 2. 



A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 179 

minster and elsewhere. Mourning, ye gowned gentry ! 
your occupation gone, are there many who, in grievous 
destitution of chattels, might righteously compute as 
their own, both 

" Their robe and their integrity to heaven ?" 



Now were you to forswear Ivy Lodge for ever, in 
dudgeon, or as the penalty of its occupier's prolixity, 
I could not forbear mentioning a colloquy in Measure 
for Measure, between majestic Isabella and her more 
craven brother Claudio: the circumstances are her 
dishonor, or the alternative, his loss of life. ^^ The 
dread of something after death" unmans him, and he 
quails in shuddering hesitancy between opposing 
causes; — before him are shadowy horrors; behind, 
the urgent, lofty, and indignant honor of his sister. 
" Death," murmurs the reluctant sacrifice, 

" Death is a fearful thing ! 

Isabella. — And shamed life a hateful. 

Claudio. — Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; 

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ; 

This sensible, warm motion to become 

A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit 

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice ; 



180 CHAPTER V. 

To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, 
And blown with restless violence round about 
The pendant world ; or to be worse than worst 
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts 
Imagine howling ! — 'tis too horrible ! 
The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
To what we fear of death !" 

The garrulous Old Man identified himself so per- 
fectly with the shrinking Claudio in the recital of this 
fine passage, that when he resumed his original 
character I fell back on the Sun's Darling (from 
which he had previously quoted,) for an exclamation 
of Eaybright — 

*' Your eyes amazed me first, but now mine ears 
Feel your tongue's charm !" 

E. — Nay, to great Will the creator be the praise, 
none to the mere earthen vessel. But now, having 
dwelt at tolerable — or, haply, intolerable length, on 
the dread of death and the timidity of wisdom, turn 
we to what my friend Folly might have laughed at as 
" the bravery of ignorance." Know firstly, then, 
that urchinless myself, I have the honor to be on 
excellent terms with half-a-dozen of the rosiest rogues 
you ever smiled to look at, the property respectively 



CHAPTER V. 181 

of three humble neighbours. The hour has some 
time gone since the imagery alone of grace and 
beauty had power to captivate, — when I feasted after 
the regimen of Robbie Biu'ns, " the admiring a fine 
woman;" and long hath the sage maximist, William 
of immortal memory, convinced me that goodness is 
the essential gold of loveliness — " Virtue of beauty." 
And with these changed feelings — travelling farther 
from the East {sic Wordsworth,) into the fading 
light of near-spent day, I find a new pleasure in the 
frank, fond heart — the " spritefulness, fair cheeks, 
and full eyes of childhood." It would cheer you in 
a December distress to see the ruddy fronts of the 
fellows of whom I spoke, to whom I let out joy on 
short leases by a word in season, a penny never out 
of season, and an approving pat on the head; and how 
pitiable the pale, precocious lads in town appear, to 
these, my jocund younkers! The mother of one of 
them — a reckless, super-rosy rebel, rising five — told 
me the other day, that the child had been to witness 
the funeral of a person of excessive corpulency, and 
came home with a serious look unusual. A resolu- 
tion suggested by the ponderosity of the dead man, 
and the hour of his interment, was brooding in him, 
and, when duly matured, burst in a request to his 



18^ 



CHAPTER V. 



mother, tliat he might not be buried in the afternoon 
of a winter-day — in case he should'nt get to heaven 
before dark! 

The sixth stroke towards ten was sounding, when 
E.'s veteran retainer announced the vehicle in which 
his daughter-in-baptism was accustomed to migrate 
to and from Ivy Lodge. There was a striking con- 
trast in the physiognomical aspects of the Elder and 
his servant; for while the former was habitually 
mirthful, there was a settled sedateness in the face 
of the latter which remained unruffled, either by 
smile or frown, under the raillery of his voluble but 
kind superior. His gesture, too, was desperately 
methodical; evincing none of that submission to im- 
pulse which ever animated the demeanor of his master. 
On that declining plane of our mortal term, where- 
from, when man brings his years to an end, he 
slides into the grave, it was hard to say which of the 
two was foremost; but if the domestic were " under 
authority," he did not appear to derive contentment 
in the especial circumstance of contiguity with a 
clime in which distinctions cease — in the prospect 
of a situation without servitude, or such as is perfect 
freedom. If his were a gravity impressed by con- 



CHAPTER V. 183 

templation of the grave — and a thoughtless man would 
not long have sojourned with E. — the object of his 
contemplation must have been hung with branches of 
yew and cypress, to which he was advancing through 
a vale of tears ; to the Elder, in whose tone when con- 
yersing upon " the inevitable hour" there was neither 
timor nor presump^ous confidence, the narrow-house 
seemed garlanded more than sadly closed in with 
evergreen. This was the outline of his argument: 
— " It is not meet that guests-expectant of a Great 
King, such as is He who claims our souls' allegiance 
— that children journeying to the home of a Father, 
who waits to welcome them by a better name than 
sons — should march mournfully to their eternal man- 
sions; and though we lay our bodies down to moulder 
for a while in the vestibule of the Sovereign's court — 
at the threshold of the home of spirits — hath not One, 
mighty to save, prepared at infinite cost a pathway for 
the disembodied divinity, by which it mounts through 
the else trackless space to its celestial father-land? 
The dust importunes us in the pleadings of natural 
alliance, and our voices catch a gloomy tone from its 
importunity; while we, meantime forgetful that we 
are but temporary aliens from angelic fellowsliip, sad- 
den the hours of our exile, by suspending our harps 



184 CHAPTER V. 

upon the willows, instead of sounding them to songs 
of thankfulness for that measureless gift of promise — 
life in the land of Love — whereof, to the grateful, the 
earnest of possession is anticipated, through the inspi- 
ration of Heaven's prime legate, Hope! " Why," 
then, '' should tears be in the old man's eye ? — 

" Why should we, then, with an untoward mind. 

And in the weakness of humanity, 

From natural wisdom turn our hearts away. 

To natural comfort shut our eyes and ears. 

And, feeding on disquiet, thus disturb 

The calm of nature with our restless thoughts?"* 

The stroke was on six, I said, when Mary was 
favored with an injunction to move: whereupon E. 
rejoined. 

Now fie, say I, upon thy pestilent punctuality, 
punctilious Ben! who, nathless that our pates have 
whitened in company, . hast no consideration for my 
peace of mind — positively none ! Harkee, Benjamin 
the inflexible ! since Mr. C, in unappreciable kindness 
to thy grim-visaged grandson, has chosen to be my 
bonny half-bairn's charioteer, I suspect thou hast, 
in gratitude to him propelled the movements of the 
clocks, sir. Now it contenteth the responsible tenant 
* The Excursion. Wordsworth. 



CHAPTER V. 187 

of the Lodge to keep up with the age — nay, Ben, to 
jog along a little in the rear: but say, O Watchman 
set in alabaster ! what of the night ? 

Benjamin replies, and makes his exit; and the 
Elder changes his key: 

Within those stolid and impassive outworks there 
beats a brave heart and warm; and if Benjamin were 
taken from me, then indeed should I be bereaved. 
If there are two living creatures who understand 
each other better than do Ben and I, it would gratify 
my curiosity to see them. — My pleasantry passes by 
him, as you observe, like an idle wind ; and though it 
may secretly affright his staid propriety, it never dis- 
turbs his serenity. Once only did he ever dubiously 
regard me; it was when, in gardening operations, I 
declared myself almost a proselyte to the Words- 
worthian theory of a sentient principle in plants : at 
what he thought and called the monstrous " faith, 

" that every flower 
Enjoys the air it breathes ; 

infidelity, graven as in adamant, was so perspicuously 
the expression of his physiognomy, that, rather than 
endanger the issue of a writ De lunatico, at the suit 
of my servants, I suffer Benjamin to remain in un- 



188 CHAPTER V. 

molested herbal heathenism. But we are deserting 
our Idol of the evening, without one praiseful or 
valedictory farewell. Be thine, O honored William 
Shakspeare ! a lofty throne where all are kings ! — 
anon of thee. Monarch of the Muses' Sons! And 
bless thee, darling Child, Mary avourneen! Look 
now, the sky is one wide smile, but chastened, for 
the glittering orbs are in adoration, could we but 
hear them. Or rather, is it not the Boundary of the 
Blest we see above us ? and what we count as shining 
stars, are they not angels' eyes — bright, but full of 
pity as they gaze on a scene which the presence 
of their God does not gladden? Ay, therein lies the 
secret of the pensiveness of Night! Surely at this 
moment is God beautifying and hallowing the world 
with his blessing ; and living things are breathing — 
scarcely breathing is the silent Earth — as conscious 
of the effluence of Heaven. A fond farewell, sweet 
Mary! — 

" Nymph, ia thy orisons 
Be all my sins remembered !" 



COLLOQUY lY. 



CONCERNING, CHIEFLY, 

"THE BLIND OLD MAN, AND HIS IMMORTAL STORY 
OF A LOST PARADISE." 



COLLOQUY IV. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 



" I am become a Name : 
I am a part of all that I have met: 
Yet all experience Is an arch wherethro' 
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades 
For ever and for ever when I move." — Tennyson. 

It would be a mode of procedure quite un-English, 
to enter upon several consecutive colloquies without 
commenting on the state of the weather. Moreover 
when, without violating Truth to gratify Patriotism, 
a compliment can be paid to the climate of his 
country, it is a Briton's duty to do so; for foreign 
calumnies upon our native skies are permitted to 
provoke undue contumely also from a people incon- 
tinently prone to grumble among themselves at much 
that invigorates their individual constitution and na- 
tional. Touching that basely-traduced atmospherical 
production, called English weather, we owe an im- 

n2 



192 CHAPTER VI. 

mense amount of thanksgiving to that more dauntless 
class of Nature's minstrels, who, leaving gentler poets 
to sound their pseans to the praise of stars and zephyrs, 
proclaim the sterner merits of hail, snow, wind, storm, 
and vapour. And, chiefly because eccentric and half- 
anomalous, among this " dauntless" band, let us elect 
the mild Cowper, for himself and clan, as the recipient 
of our gratulations. It is pleasure, slightly tinged 
with pity, to accompany the valiant valetudinarian — 
bold in seclusion, timid in the shock of men — while 
he scourges the " pleasant vices" of the herd, which 
he, " a stricken deer," had quitted ; — right comfortable 
is it to see him putting upon his country a commanding 
aspect which he could not put upon himself; and 
to hear him thus venting the healthy vigor of his 
English heart, before one of the gloomiest of national 

pictures— " Though thy clime 

Be fickle, and thy year most part deformed 
With dripping- rains, or witliered by a frost, 
I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies 
And fields without a flower, for warmer France 
With all her vines, nor for Ausonia's groves 
Of golden fruitage and her myrtle bowers." 

Now in the creed of one at least (and of the least) 
of his compatriots, of few pleasanter sensations is this 
cold hut of human clay susceptible, than when the 



CHAPTER VI. 193 

genial sun melts all tlie heart within it into a gatte so 
diffusive^ that after inundating all its environs with 
its fiood of joy, it extends a lavish flow of compassion 
to those misjudging masses abroad, who imagine the 
Indomitable Isle to be enveloped in perpetual hroinl- 
lards. If Variety be " the very spice of life," as 
some have chosen to denominate it, then life in 
England is surely highly flavoured, elementally : still 
there are who complain fastidiously that the element 
is not to their taste; and the aerial ragout is taken 
with especially- wry faces by nervous elderlings subject 
a Vennuyeuse maladie, ce de conserver la sanU par uii 
trop grand regime^ In the course of a brief pro- 
fessional career, I have advocated more dispiriting 
causes than that which now, without con-si-de-ra-tion 
of any kind, I have undertaken on behalf of the 
climate of my country. Addressing, of course, a dis- 
criminating jury, I contend, of course with deference, 
that to an English subject on whose amiable tem- 
perament the evidence of sociality has a soothing 
effect, and who (perchance not caring " to unsphere 
the spirit of Plato,") may, in the lower walks of prac- 
tical philosophy, be placidly making the best of his 
condition at all times and in all places, — to such an 
* La Rocbefoucauld. 



194 CHAPTER VI. 

one it cannot be merely reconciliatory, it is more a 
matter of active rejoicing, that the Four Seasons 
which preside over his country's year, and exercise 
extensive influence on his country's weal, should 
present, as they do, a truly edifying example of 
good fellowship in their intercourse with each other. 
Now this disposition is rarely found in a limited 
coterie, where separate interests strongly prevail, and 
jealousy is prompt to rise at officious intermeddling. 
Our Seasons maintain a most cordial intimacy, ex- 
changing visits en deshabille ; and that lively move- 
ment of barometrical mercury at which a maledictory 
man might rail, the complacent jury I have the honor 
to address would delight in, as^n indubitable token 
that one of the subdominant triad was passing com- 
pliments with the regnant Season. Where, too, in 
this " low-thoughted " sphere, a small number of 
functionaries attain alternatively a chief and brief 
authority, their individual period of pre-eminency is 
very nicely marked: — our British Seasons scorn a 
duration of presidency so accurately defined; — there 
is a noble free-and-easiness in each one's entrance 
upon empire, and exit from it, that expands the ideas 
to reflect upon. And in this their habit of frequent 
intervisitation, the more sanguine of the panel before 



CHAPTER VI. 195 

which I am privileged to plead, will immediately 
recognise the interest which the entire Quaternity 
take in the affairs of Earth. Blessings in this present 
condition of existence are wisely qualified with evil — 
wholesomely bittered, no doubt — and we continue to 
lament in sorrow as the sparks fly upwards ; so that, 
were it absurdly unreasonable, it is conformable to 
very ancient custom, to regret, that when the volatile 
Harbinger of welcome Father Christmas looks abroad 
unexpectedly, (and he does, allowedly, give the rein 
rather freely to Caprice,) there should be a cramping 
influence in his eye, which now denudes shrubs, &c. 
when a family's birthright might be had for a blanket ; 
and now creates a panic on the banks, at which even 
hardy snowdrops gasp " t-r-o-p fortV^ and go off in 
convulsions, — which staggers itinerant melodists in 
mid-air, excites a general shudder among nesd:lings 
whose mothers are from home, and hurries many a 
newly-perfected chrysalis to a bourne from whence 
no butterfly returns. The prior of these effects, 
brought about by the veteran Winter's visitings to the 
mellow matron Autumn, has a beneficial counter- 
operation, opening the heart to Charity, and reminding 
the benevolent in high places, that in lower places 
the large family of Penury will soon look longingly 



196 CHAPTER VI. 

for wonted " little acts of love ;" and if, in the libe- 
rality of his nature, he acts as proxy for Spring while 
yet an infant, who can resent his courtesy ? Howbeit, 
in social reciprocity the Rulers of the British Year 
exercise dominion : — by-and-by (is not pertness com- 
mon to the very, very pretty?) the bright-eyed Spring 
bids mimic defiance to her bald-pated Predecessor, 
who (made crusty perhaps by her jocose excesses,) 
blows bitingly upon her cheek of smiles, sometimes 
even to their scattering; — and, later, (is there a beat- 
ing heart which such solicitude affects not?) how 
often do we perceive the ardent Summer adventuring 
into the realm of retiring Autumn, to bless with one 
more kiss the Earth's frail offspring, ere Autumn 
confide them in their death to be sepultured in snowy 
cearments by the hand of Winter. 

The loving Summer retired from active duty in 
1841 with blushing honors thick upon her. A fiat 
had gone forth, benedictory to the harvest and the 
store, and she had responded cheerily to His bene- 
volent will whose ministress she is : the burdened fields 
therefore stood so thick with corn, that the churl 
might have found their rejoicing contagious, as by 
hill-side and lowland the ripening grain bent its 
burnished head to the soft breeze. It was making 



CHAPTER VI. 197 

glad the heart of man, and kept time to its low con- 
gratulatory chant in these gentle undulations, as at 
sweet music, lovely Lady, you may have swayed your 
own fair form, impulsively. O, Wordsworth ! chief 
among the wise who proclaim a sentient attribute in 
whatsoever the Inscrutable hath endowed with life, 
a glorifying creed is thine, and is not visionary. — 
Conscious, by the demonstrations of science, that we 
are in contact with fecund animation, though to the 
eye invisible, is it Wisdom which contemns the pro- 
bability that we are dwellers in a 'cocal universe, 
because upon our drowsied sense no audible accents 
fall? If the eye be veiled from the perception of an 
animated, why may not the ear be deafened to an 
articulate world? Constructed and capacitated as we 
now are, the Eternal " hath done wisely to conceal" 
from this, our orbed observatory, a view as much too 
vivid for our comfort as for our comprehension; for 
how much greater latitude of emotion should we 
require above that which we possess, if to the little 
microcosm, man, the vast and busy creation were 
suddenly manifested in all its marvellous operations. 
But this acquisition of intelligence is wisely reserved 
for a period when awe and wonder shall be excited 
by many mighty discoveries, beside those pertaining 



198 CHAPTER VI. 

to our terrestrial sojourn: yet, among those dis- 
coveries, thy faith, persevering Interpreter of the 
Invisible and Inaudible! shall, doubtlessly, approve 
its demonstrator and defender to have possessed a 
vision clarified above his contemporaries, — a mind 
whose ideality was less a baseless fabric of the fancy 
than the rudiments and outline of a grand reality, 
which the rolling away of cataract and cloud from 
human sight shall leave disclosed, in the fulness and 
perfection of a divine development. 

Towards the close of an Autumn day, (of which 
digression has so procrastinated the description, that 
now I decline it altogether,) the Elder in a rustic, 
ivy-covered garden-seat, was luxuriating in the light 
of a setting sun, the quivering song of the more wake- 
ful or belated of the feathered quire, and the company 
of rosy-tinted but well-nigh wearied flowers. 

" Ah!" said he, on observing me, " is not this a 
season and a scene in which, if ever, we may imagine 
the primal state of our first progenitors, when, seated 
in a sinless sanctuary, and sheltered by their Maker's 
smile, they watched this wondrous receding of Day 
and^ solemn approach of Night? _ But I was gazing 
slothfully when I saw you — 

" Thought was not— in enjoyment it expired" 



CHAPTER VI. 199 

as I sat imbibing the still spirit of the spectacle — 
for it is eminently one of those, whereof 

" The colours and the forms are unto us 
An appetite — n feeling and a love 
Which have no need of a remoter charm 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unborrovv'd from the eye." 

I expressed regret that, by obtruding, I had broken 
the spell which had bound him in so blissful a state 
of bondage. 

S. — Save your regrettings for a more deserving 
occasion: I prefer quick feelings to supine; — silent 
felicity engenders indolence of thought, and that 
which is now voluptuousness, presently degenerates 
to vapidity. How potent are external influences 
upon the mind — so various, too, in their effects, that 
the inner world of the feelings makes its diurnal 
revolution, and exhibits a different phase at morn, 
and noon, and eve, and night. When I go out in the 
fresh vigor of the dawn, and am in health, I feel 
to this day something of the exultation of my early 
life, when Care went not up with me at morn into the 
high places, and every ecstatic throb of the heart, 
could it have spoken, would have 

" Bless'd God for the mountains!" 



200 CHAPTEll VI. 

" Mornings are mysteries," says an old poet:* their 
effect of light and air stirred up electrically the whole 
inert and latent joy within me, and my mood was wildly 
thankful ; — the wildness has somewhat abated, owing 
to "auld acquaintance" with him of whom (pointing to 
his forehead,) these indentures witness, aided by the 
circumstance of having here no hills to climb ; yet my 
out-door morning feelings could not, even now, be 
called serene. 

" It is very diiferent in this holy hour of eve, when 
the West summons every eye to witness this gorgeous 
pageantry of the Sun's descent, and Earth regards 
her life-giver's departure in admiration mute; — and 
the sadness of a farewell prevails; for living things 
look anxiously upon their source of life, and seem to 
dread his going down, as if there were a danger of 
his not returning. "We feel no predominant passion 
now to ' bless God for the mountains ;' our paramount 
praise is for the hope of glory ; and, that yielded, in 
sober gratitude for all this merciful manifestation of 
Power and Wisdom, we pour forth the full heart of 
adoration in strains like these, too majestically-moving 
for my befitting utterance during the abandon of the 
morn : — 

* Henry Vaughan. 



CHAPTER VI. 201 

* These are thy glorious works, Parent of good ! 

Almighty I thine this universal frame, 

Thus wondrous fair ; Thyself how wondrous then ! 

Unspeakable, who sitt'st above these heav'ns 

To us Invisible, or dimly seen 

In these thy lowest works ; yet these declare 

Thy goodness beyond thought, and pow'r divine.' " 

The Old Man's voice discoursed eloquent music^ 
but he looked unutterable meaning : " the sweet face 
of the Night" had solemnised his manner, and he 
retained unwonted gravity: his varieties of feeling 
were exceedingly remote, but were always expressive 
and never extravagant; — they were not '^piteous 
revolutions." It seemed as if the hymn from which 
he had quoted in the garden had supplied him ad- 
ventitiously with a text whereupon to descant ; for on 
adjourning to the interior he opened the Paradise 
Lost, and commenced devoutly: 

E. — Entering on this Poem we feel, or ought to 
feel, that we are in sacred precincts, and that at its 
elevated threshold we should piit away from us the 
defilement of mean associations. PesiCTuinsc ourselves 
to an atlantean and adventurous Guide, we are carried 
to the black and sulphurous abyss of anarchy, — are 
wafted through infijiite space, — and ascend, ^^ by de- 
grees magnificent, beyond the wall of heaven." — 



W2 CHAPTER VI. 

But the way, which is sometimes drear and dark, is 
at other times labyrinthine and obscure; and well it 
is if, where we cannot move by sight, we firmly pro- 
ceed by faith ; for lore which the Omniscient withheld 
from "holy men of old," He has not in these latter days 
communicated; and therefore Milton, in the process 
of an argument, anticipatory of man's creation and 
historic of his fall, has found himself in occasional 
embarrassment in " vindicating" the Eternal. — And 
necessarily so ; for His thoughts are not our thoughts, 
and who hath, been His counsellor? In the Father's 
address to the Son, for instance, contemplating the 
seduction of our Sire by satanic guile, the Poet is in. one 
of those inscrutable involutions of " foreknowledge, 
will, and fate," which Inspiration has not elucidated, 
and at which, in this world, E-eason must gaze — if it 
insist on gazing — as through a glass darkly. And to 
me it has ever seemed an awful provocation to the 
All-wise to lay bare His arm, when captious human 
Reason would dictate to the Deity the larger degree 
to which, for that poor querulous Reason's satisfaction, 
it would have Him lay bare His Mind. Now that 
the original terms of obedience have been revoked 
by rebellion, our present terms of faith follow as from 
intelligible premises, and are based on the partial 



CHAPTER VI. 201 

concealment of the plan of Providence; for there 
could be no exercise of credence if all that concerns 
our hope and trust were manifest. Yet how ample 
the foundation laid for the superstructure of our 
faith, would we not cumber it with our gainsayings ! 
Beset by the machinations of a mighty Foe,, are we not 
bidden to confide boldly in a more puissant Friend ? 

" O, but man — proud man! 
Most ignorant of what he's most assured," 

protests ! — cavils with his Creator ! The tenant of an 
hour, from his tabernacle of corruption, engages in 
controversy with the Architect and Pervader of the 
universe — impugns the Mind of which his loftier 
part is now but a polluted essence ! Oh ! disclaiming 
impious comparison, next among marvels to the love 
of God, is the presumption of the outcast, man. 

" The abstract contemplation of a lost paradise 
incites to a fruitless lament for felicity we never 
knew, which, however, gives way to a profound 
contentment, when we gather under survey of our 
pining souls the reinforcements provided by our He- 
ligion, which, ordinarily, we permit to remain too 
much in ineffective reserve; — we conceal in secret, 
inanimate ambush, the invincibly-accoutred legion 



204 CHAPTER VI. 

whose rightful post is in the van of our daily conflict. 
In the strife we have hourly to sustain, we draw not 
largely enough on our almighty Ally, who, though 
we too oft forget, rememhers ever that we are but 
dust: and considering that our hearts' instinctive 
craving is for a consolation they cannot find in the 
world's corrupted cisterns, it is curious they should 
leave comparatively forsaken the fountain which flows 
with the only efiicient solace for the sinking spirit. 
Marshalling the array of evidence which Heaven has 
unrolled before the ken of humanity, the mind erects 
itself on an impregnable rampart, from whence it 
placidly regards the confusions and perplexities of 
life, and arms its hopes with weapons which, wrought 
in a celestial armoury, scatter this world's dishearten- 
ments swiftly as at the sword of Michael the rebel 
angels fled. I delight in the assertion, and in its 
reiteration, that ' there is nothing so reasonable as 
Keligion :' — assuredly there is nothing so protective, 
for the feeble being whose reliance it is, ' gathers a 
force and faith under him, w^hich nature of itself 
could never attain; '* — there is nothing so consolatory, 
for ' it creates new hopes when all earthly hopes 
fail;'t — there is nothing so ennobling, for the cease- 
* Lord Bacon. f Sir Iliimphrey Davy. 



CHAPTER VI. 205 

less employment of the religious man is the ' fitting 
up his mind and preparing it for a glorious abode;'* 
and in reference to an effect seldom insisted on, 'you 
may depend upon it religion is, in its essence, the 
most gentlemanly thing in the world: it will alone 
gentilize, if unmixed with cant, and I know nothing 
else that will, alone. 'f 

" I sometimes think, that in the dread Day of Award 
Silence will for a moment seal the lips of the redeemed, 
while, with sublimated glance, they survey the various 
pathways whereby the ardent seekers after Truth 
have attained their goal, and what impediments they 
have battled with and beaten, and dispiritings sur- 
mounted : but silence may endure but for a moment ! 
— the amazing Love that ransomed, and righteous 
Judgment that adjudicates, shall awaken in Heaven's 
^ new possessors' a spontaneous and accordant shout, 
so mighty, that through the realm of God their rapture 
shall drown in its loud resonance the minstrelsy that 
ceases never to magnify the Most High. For, methinks, 
the harp and lute of those who never knew distrust 
of soul or sorrow of heart cannot rival the voices 
which triumph shall animate; the blessings of those 
whose high estate has shut out woe, must\iQ overborne 
* Goldsmith. t Coleridge. 



^06 CHAPTER VI. 

by theirs to wliom the transition is from anguish to 
bliss; the adoration of those to whom Justice has 
never been ' invisible, or dimly seen/ shall certainly 
be overwhelmed in their acclamations who, once, it 
may be, dubious, shall view the All-adorable in the 
refulgent sanctity of His most perfect ' vindication.' 

" I know of no scepticism or scruples from certain 
apparent incongruities which meditative men have 
told me debar them from a devout acceptation of the 
creed on which our souls' hopes are founded; — that 
infinite Perfection, armed with a controlling power, 
is yet permissive of the propagation of Evil; that 
Purity, although it abhors and denounces, coerces not. 
I am not confounded by the sufferings of the virtuous, 
the sorrows of the good, the seeming exemption of 
the vile, the ostensible ease of the indifferent, the 
occasional perplexity of the inquiring. These are 
incidents contingent with, and partly constituting, 
the probationary process by which, through privation 
and discouragement, we are re-fitted for Paradise. 
— I have found my questionings oi possibility most 
prone to rise, over the chronicles of God's compassion : 
His power and His providential bounty are properties 
both visible and tangible ; but that The Brightness 
OF His Glory should have assumed our nature, and 



CHAPTER VI. 207 

in it have endured rejection from those whom He 
came to ransom; — that in virulence and violence He 
should yet have summoned no awe-struck legions 
from the realms of lights to avenge the indignities 
their celestial Chief was enduring at the hands of 
men, in order that he might snatch them as brands 
from the burning; — that though the penalty of the 
prodigious enterprise was a sustenance of the Curse, 
under which he who bore it must yield his heart's 
blood, now in protracted passion through the imper- 
ceptible pore, and then in sacrificial agony through 
the gaping wound; — that immaculate and infinite 
Compassion, without demeaning the divinity, should 
taste of death in its most degraded form, that earth's 
grovelling ingrate might be exalted among ^ the en- 
throned gods in sainted seats,' is an exaction upon 
the faith of a contemplative mind that might disturb 
it with incredulity, were the records less trustworthy 
which relate, to selfish men, the mystical vastness of 
the divine sympathy. 

" One especial moral springs from the meditation 
of this marvellous oblation of Love — there can be no 
sympathy in heaven with the self-sufiicient. From 
the hour of that most daring insurrection in Thine 
own abode, has it not been seen, that. 



208 CHAPTER VI. 

'' Merciful Heaven T 
Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous holt, 
Splitt'st the unwedgable and gnarled oak 
Than the soft myrtle ?'* 

'^ I have perambulated far from the Poem, in all 
this; but serious thoughts flow naturally from its 
solemn theme, and forcibly to divert or counteract 
their current is ill beseeming a man who cannot be 
far distant from ' an abiding city, a place in another 
country, where he must rest or else be restless for 
ever.'t Let us however enter, for a little while, this 
Lost Paradise, at whose exterior we have thus lin- 
gered. 

" Yet, pausing for a brief moment at its entrance, 
is it not beyond expression interesting, to review, 
through the medium of truthful history and apocry- 
phal tradition, the process by which this stupendous 
poetic pyramid was reared — a structure so unapproach- 
able in the grandeur of its symmetry, that the solitary 
achievements of others — imposing when solitarily 
surveyed — appear insignificant if placed in juxta- 
position with it. There exists an indestructible cluster 
of the habitations of Poesy, distinguished by various 
charms; but they shrink into shadow when viewed 

* Measure for Measure. — Shakspeare. f Taylor. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. ^9 

by an eye which the contemplation of dimensions so 
vast has distended and enlarged. ^ It is not the great- 
est of heroic poems, only because it is not the first^ 
says Dr. Johnson; but stands it not unparalleled in 
its sublimity ? From what we know of Milton's self- 
dependency, I fancy there was never a Poet who, 
conscious of having consummated a great work, of 
which many co-operating causes might tend to mar 
the reputation at the period of its completion, con- 
fided so assuredly in ultimate appreciation, as did 
this illustrious man. The contrast between Milton 
and Shakspeare in this respect, is remarkable: the 
latter sensitively shrinks from posthumous notoriety; 
and in his poems almost painfully protests against 
being made a candidate for the plaudits of posterity : — 

" O if (I say) you took upon this verse, 
When I perhaps compounded am with clay, 
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, 
Lest the wise world mock." * * 

And again, 

" O, lest your true love may seem false in this, 
Thai you for love speak well of me untrue, 
My name be buried where my body is, 
And live no more to shame nor me nor you. 
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth." 

If thou hast ears to hear, O Shade of Shakspeare i 



210 CHAPTER VI. 

know that ' the wise world ' persists in a contrary- 
notion. But ' the blind Old Man/ whose intrepidity 
urged him beyond ^ the flaming bounds of place and 
time,' knew no distrust in his reliance on s.ucceeding 
ages. He had carved for himself a shrine around 
which Genius in the years to come should wander 
with suspended breathings; had built for himself, 
and consciously, a 'live-long monument;' had fore- 
sepulchred himself in the reverent remembrance of 
posterity ; had graven in the EoU of the Eenowned 
the name of ' Milton/ in characters which the failure 
of intelligence might obscure, but which the flight 
of Time could not eflace. And so — I speak of him 
as moved by ' fond hopes of glory/ — upheld by the 
conviction that he had left to future ages a fame they 
* would not willingly let die/ he could move on to- 
wards Death with the serene dignity of a mighty man 
from whom Prejudice had withholden cotemporaneous 
approbation, but whom the Past had taught to regard 
that present approbation as subsidiary. For him, as 
with the Great in every generation, 

' Enough, if something from his hand had power 
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;' 

and a guarantee for the durability of his fame might 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 211 

be found in the theme he had chosen; for man's 
interest in it was ' infused at the creation of the kind/ 
and for ever will it closely ' come home to men's 
business and bosoms ;' — long as a sentient being, con- 
versant with the Poet's language and the light of 
letters, mourns in this lower world his alienation from 
a better, so long will that sublime story be reverently 
perused, which treats 

' Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit 
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought Death into the world and all our woe, 
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.* 

" The Poet's theme involves our grandest interests, 
and his illustration of it caught inspiration from its 
grandeur. As he conceived and prosecuted its ^ argu- 
ment,' a matter of universal moment was removed so 
far beyond the sphere in which human reason and 
imagination are wont to dilate, that had it not been 
sustained by a gigantic intellect, the proud essay 
would have provoked reproach; — he explored regions 
so distant in their latitude and character from this 
^ dim spot which men call Earth,' — assumed a cog- 
nizance of beings between whom and us so great a 
gulf is fixed, that had his design been undevout, his 



212 CHAPTER VI. 

temerity were of the order of Prometheus. To ' vin- 
dicate' the Infinite to the finite is the high office of 
sacred ambassadors, efiected best by the pure sim- 
plicity of His word; but here we witness the Deity 
vindicated to the child of dust, by a basement and 
partial outwork of corroborated truth, built upon and 
filled in by a fancy which, though fallen and fallible, 
was abashed to no arrestive degree by the conscious- 
ness of frailty — confined within no boundary of being; 
— wiser than Uriel, nigh to God — than Satan, chief 
in hell : with buoyancy to soar to the sublimest turret 
of the pavilion of Heaven's King, with gravamen to 
descend to the profoundest mine of dark confederate 
fiends, with elasticity to expand over all space ; above, 
in more than Sinai-like proximity with The Presence 
in whose radiance the angels veil; beneath, in dread 
vicinity with the Arch-rebel at v/hose voice * the 
hollow deep of hell resounds.' — These are associations 
that enter into Milton's justification of God, itself 
* justified only by success.'* " . 

C. — Numerous are the opinions that take pos- 
session of our minds without a substantial title, and 
(probably from getting into company with our pre- 
judices,) become exceedingly difficult to dislodge. 
* Johnson. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. . 213 

One of such has accustomed me to attribute to the 
hlindness of Milton more than his commentators have 
attributed, of the sublimity and profundity of the 
Paradise Lost. Next to the extinction of" the heaven- 
lighted lamp" of reason, the saddest sensual depriva- 
tion known to man is generally esteemed to be the 
loss of sight : the absence of no other sense appeals so 
movingly to our common sympathy; there is no pathos 
like the plea of the blind. But if we estimate the 
mind as our chief endowment, and esteem its culture 
as our chief concern, we shall perceive how different 
are the degrees of misfortune dependent on the period 
at which the faculties of the mind's principal agent are 
suspended. The eloquent lamentations of Milton in 
his " irrecoverable darkness," both in his Great Poem 
and in Samson, dissolve the heart by their intense 
and pervading plaintiveness : in his sonnet to Cyriac 
Skinner the spirit of complaint retires before the 
spirit of resigned submission to " Heaven's hand and 
will," and takes even a tone of triumph from self- 
approving (and somewhat " stern) exaltedness of zeal"* 
in " Liberty's defence." But the visual viaduct to 
Milton's mighty mind was not obstructed until vast 
resources had been conveyed by that channel to a 
* Prisoner of Chillon. Byron. 



214 CHAPTER VI. 

most capacious reservoir. The veil fell upon his eye 
at a period when sight, as an auxiliary to the mind, 
had performed, and well performed, its function; — 
Wisdom was not " shut out" at that main entrance, 
till after long and laborious aggrandisement had so 
profusely stored the intellectual treasury with mul- 
tifarious gems, that there needed a respite from ac- 
cumulation. When, therefore, night came, it afforded 
a season for the assortment, review, and exposition 
of the treasures that had been amassed by the in- 
dustry of the day. IVhat augmentation of grandeur 
the Poet's conceptions acquired by the mental ab- 
stractedness resulting from his blindness — to what 
particular degree the pinions of his fancy were in- 
vigorated by his ocular privation — may excite con- 
jecture, to no very satisfactory ascertainment: yet, 
that his imagination received a new energy to its eagle 
wing — derived a portion of the vigor of its towering 
flight and impetus of its descent, from very inability 
to expend its strength in a visible and comparatively 
circumscribed sphere, I am disposed to be largely 
credulous. 

E. — Political and religious feuds had lamentably 
distorted and exacerbated the judgments of those who 
were contemporaries with the Poet; and where the 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 215 

practice on all hands was crimination and retort^ the 
Charity which " endureth all things" could point ap- 
provingly to few. In all communities there are, it is 
to be feared, a numerous class of persons exceedingly 
keen in discerning the judicial dispensations of Pro- 
vidence, as they affect their fellow-creatures, and in 
construing the divine intention in the infliction of 
each calamity or apparent evil. — I have heard the 
soi-disant humble, the self-satisfied pure-in-heart, 
most odious oracles in the interpretation of affliction. 
Not to wander from the Poet, however, and touching 
your remarks concerning the beneficial influence of 
his blindness upon the character of his conceptions, 
I remember a noble burst of his indignation at an 
insinuation of his enemies, that his great deprivation 
was a mark of the divine displeasure. " If the choice 
were necessary," he declares, " I would prefer my 
blindness to yours : yours is a cloud spread over the 
mind, which darkens both the light of reason and of 
conscience ; mine keeps from my view only the colored 
surfaces of things, while it leaves me at liberty to 
contemplate the beauty and stability of virtue and of 
truth. There is, as the Apostle has remarked, a way 
to strength through weakness. Let me then be the 
most feeble creature alive, as long as that feebleness 



216 CHAPTER VI. 

serves to invigorate the energies of my rational and 
immortal spirit; as long as in that obscurity in which 
I am enveloped the light of the divine presence more 
clearly shines !" * The Poet appears in this to favor 
the supposition that his physical deprivation was not 
at least detrimental to his intellectual faculties. 

(7, — Beneiicial rather than detrimental, and greatly 
beneficial. The man of might was alone with his 
far-reaching and cyclopsedic mind, by a cause pro- 
foundly sorrowful placed in fortunate isolation. I am 
surprised that Dr. Johnson should have appropriated 
so inconsiderable an amount of probable effect to a 
circumstance almost compelling the exercise of the 
imagination — the exploration of the fancy, and in- 
citing to more adventurous enterprises a mind so ill 
at ease in inactivity as was Milton's. Campbell, too, 
alludes to his blindness in no tone of sanguine belief 
that " darkness aided intellectual thought:"! speaking 
of the " congenial impressioifs" made on Milton in 
Italy, by the frescos of Angelo and the pictures of 
Raphael, he says they may " possibly have been re- 
called in the formation of Milton's great poem, when 
his eyes were shut upon the world, and when he 
looked inwardly for ' godlike shapes and forms.' " 
* Second Defence for the People of England. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 211 

But Sir Egerton Brydges is bolder, and asserts, that 
" his outward blindness did but strengthen his inward 
light. Perhaps (he adds,) but for this blindness his 
creative faculties had not been sufficiently concen- 
trated to produce his great poem. He was now shut 
out from worldly distractions, and the day was as the 
covering calm of night to him." 

J5. — The calm of night, indeed, but not that 
night whose fetters bind down our bodies in salutary 
and soothing restraint, till " Morn's rosy hand unbars 
the gates of light," and we go forth athirst again for 
the elixir which Nature divinely and diffusely pours, 
like a rich baptismal unction on the early brow of 
Day. Alas! fruitless to Mm the upland walk for 
" unimpeded commerce with the sun," as 

" Morn, her rosy steps in th' eastern clime 
Advancing, sow'd the earth with orient pearl;" 

before him Night sat for ever on her ebon throne — he 
kindled no more at the rapture of the reawakening 
world; to him all uninfectious now " the cheerful ways 
of men," the wild mirth of children, the glad face of 
Nature, the regal sun and radiated cloud, — 

C. — Pardon me for thinking that you breathe a 
rather " browner horror" over the scene than belongs 



218 CHAPTER VI. 

to it reasonably. You forget the willingness of his 
submission to a ^^ feebleness" that did not militate with 
mental vigor, and his own testimony that, so far from 
paralysing or prostrating the energies of his mind, it 
caused an influx of diviner light. The alone loss 
of sight (deranging no intellectual faculty or function) 
would in any case revive Memory, and in Milton's, 
if it did not lend sportive vivacity to Fancy, it urged 
it into the illimitable, and undoubtedly aided his con- 
ceptions of the incorporeal. 

E. — Ay, but vivid as were Memory and Fancy, 
the very vividness with which they reminded him of 
what had once been rapture, must have made still 
sadder the remembrance of " a glory that had passed 
away" from him, in this life, for ever. Although in 
reference to his blindness he may occasionally 

" have writ the style of gods, 
And made a pish at suflferanee," 

I have no doubt his really-acquiescent mood was 
transitory, and soon disturbed by the irksomeness of 
that enduring eclipse which veiled from him 

" the silent looks of happy things." 

The sorrowing sympathy we feel for Milton in his 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 219 

affliction, is a far profounder feeling than that spon- 
taneous pity which ever stirs in presence of the blind; 
of him above all men it may be emphatically said, that 
his heart knew its own bitterness in privation, as, in the 
bodying forth of his sublime imaginings, no stranger 
might intermeddle with its joy. In my opinion 
you touch his '' ark of grief" too presumptuously. 
There was little in Milton — in aAvful and magnificent 
Milton — that was held in common with others ; there 
might be a sameness of material elements, there was 
evidently the same liability to " all adversities which 
happen to the body;" but as it regards 7ne7i, he " stood 

" Among them but not of them, in a shroud 
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts." 

Your especial idol has said of this remoteness from 
the crowd, 

" Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart j"* 

and it is this intellectual isolation that excites, in me, 
a disposition towards intense regretfulness before 
the imaginary spectacle of the blind Poet. For, to 
thousands in similar exclusion firom the visible world, 
the ^'drop serene" that shuts out light, only enthrones 

* Wordsworth. 



220 CHAPTER VI. 

lethargy; their hearts possess ability to make to 
themselves an humble heaven with very scant appli- 
ances ; their eye, even in the day of its power, might 
have been an " idle orb," as far as — in capacity of a 
spy, subserving the mind — it reconnoitred the visible 
in order to store and to fortify the intellectual. But 
to the unquenched orb of Milton, the silent symbol- 
language of Nature was most stirring and significant ; 
he " heard a voice" where others could not, and saw 
wonders in the waste places: the calm languor that 
to others " idlesse might seem," had, for him, " its 
morality." By how many is the changing scenery 
in which they live and move regarded with lack- 
lustre eye; seeing, they see not: so that seed-time 
and harvest return, and the early and the latter rain, 
to them it is all one, whether Nature array herself in 
flowered chintz or in the floral sheen of spring-time ; 
whether she o'erarch their daily path with dim vapor 
or with the witching cobalt sky and mother-o' -pearly 
cloud; — whether rude Boreas rumble through the 
lofty and long-drawn aisles of her temple — their daily 
walk, or whether the vast sunlit nave be inundated 
with commingling song; — all one is it, whether she 
do all but arrest them per vi, in garden or field or by 
wayside, to coax them into more cheerful contentment 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 221 

by pleasant stories, all of promise — daily-perfecting 
promise; or whether she be attired in the half- 
mourning magnificence of her autumnal apparel, 
when promise has ripened into full fruition. But 
for him of whom we speak, these transformations had 
a potent charm ; and when came 

" The sweet season that bud and bloome forth brings," 

he would have it to be " stubbornness" not to go out 

and be eye-witness of the general joy. Profound, I 

believe, and permanent, was the plaint of Milton 

while under the enduring cloud. 

C. — Wordsworth is known to be no admirer of 

Gray; yet, although I reverence the dicta of the 

great living Master, I cannot find an encomiastic 

tribute to Milton to rival the brilliant allusion in the 

Progress of Poesy, left us by that " consummate 

master of poetic diction :" — 

" Nor second he, that rode sublime 

Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, 

The secrets of the abyss to spy ; 

He passed the flaming bounds of place and time: — 

The living throne, the sapphire blaze. 

Where angels tremble while they gaze, 

He saw, but blasted with excess of light. 

Closed his eyes in endless night." 

K — There is something Miltonic in that noble 



222 CHAPTER VI. 

motet — pity that so grand a swell should so soon die 
away! But as it relates to the hero — the Rider on 
seraph-wings, is it not a moving piece of mental 
imagery, capable of metamorphoses stranger in their 
reality than are many of the wonders of romance, 
that blind Old Man, in modest apparel seated beside 
his lowly portal, in all the pitiable impotency of his 
infirmity ; " on evil days fallen, with dangers com- 
passed, in darkness and solitude ;" and then, (marvel- 
lous contrast between corporeal imbecility and mental 
puissance!) to view him as withdrawn from contact 
with the stir and toil of men and strife of " evil 
tongues,'* as having entered into synods of gods, and 
with intellect expanded by archangelic intercourse, 
to hear him on his descent reporting " things invisible 
to mortal sight:" — nor uninteresting is it to reflect 
by what casual instrumentality were recorded 

" The visions which arose without a sleep." * 

I humbly think, however — an error, perhaps, of " the 
voluntary taste of common intellect," as opineth Sir 
Egerton Brydges — that the current of the Poet's 
august conceptions is sometimes prejudicially effected 
by extraneous supplies ; — the main fluxion is troubled 
* Lament of Tasso. Byron. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 223 

by the tributary streams that at frequent intervals 
flow into it from the Pierian springs, 

" which rush, 
No rill, but rather an o'erflovving flood."* 

Turning, as we have done, from Shakspeare to Mil- 
ton, — from effusions, literally elusions of simplicity, 
to a production distinguished for scholarship, — the 
transition is doubtlessly unfavorable to Milton, as it 
regards general effectiveness. Ministers of Prudence 
defend us from less reverently contemplating the 
edifice of a wise master-builder, because of our 
inability to construe all its artistical points; and in 
the spacious arena of the Epic, as in a vast bazaar 
— here crescent, there meandering — a Gleaner of 
gems fr'om many climes, a Pearl-diver from his very 
youth, might well dazzle weak eyes and confuse feeble 
faculties, when — his merchandise disposed in due 
array — he should invite the curious to inspect its 
gorgeous profusion. But then^ the magically-moving 
naivete of that greater Pet of Nature's, whom she 
cradled by " lucid Avon," tossed in infancy and 
juvenescence like a large-armed, honest, doating nurse 
whose fondlings are of terrific fervor ; who taught the 
* Cowper's Translation of Milton's Latin Poem to his Father. 



CHAPTER VI. 



chiel to take notes in strange situations for a darling 
of hers, and, when he attained his prime> so dowered 
him, that the scarce second Scion of whom we have 
discoursed, avers, in homage to his Senior, that kings, 
for a tomb like " my Shakspeare's," might long to die. 
I think I have previously mentioned to you a vene- 
rable friend, who, with a love of poetry of which Age 
has not chilled the ardency, is, strangely, little " moved 
by concord of sweet sounds," and trusts (in his own 
quaint expression,) " to find that heaven is something 
better than a large orchestra." His appreciation of 
" glorious, untutored Will, and mighty, scholastic 
John," is genuinely British. — " That ostentatious dis- 
play of scholarship — that seizing upon every occasion 
to let the world know how well he was acquainted 
Avith all the realms of Art and Science, of classic and 
romantic lore, which is continually visible in Milton — 
is not at all to my taste (says he); but Willie's ' sweet 
neglect' of artistical embellishment — the ease with 
which his pen transfixes ideal images of grace and 
beauty, without casting carefully about for ' florid 
prose or honied rhyme,' and yet so frequently ex- 
quisite where seemingly unstudied — are features that 
when the eye looks upon, it /ores." He who thus 
opineth was with me a few days since : he is a logician, 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 225 

and has a habit of demanding ^^ proof ^^ upon assertion, 
which makes it advisable, before introducing to him 
an hypothesis, to ascertain that it has legs to stand on. 
During a cursory discussion upon Milton, I meekly 
ventured to hint how fair a field might Moore have 
found in Paradise, prior to our Ancestors' ejectment: 
the pen that reported the Loves of the Angels, would 
not its current have crystallised, and flowed in iris- 
hues, as it told of the Garden, when, as with the 
yet-lingering pressure of the Creator's hand, it was 
pronounced " good," and was blissful as are all things 
which are born of God. 'Twas an evening lovely as 
that we just now witnessed, when my ancient ally was 
with me ; and the beautiful time so forcibly suggested 
the primeval vesper-hour, ere Danger frowned through 
the darkness to agitate Dread, and when, by gentle 
graduation brooded over by the silver-winged Silence, 
the young world sunk, in the languor of long hap- 
piness to rest, in order to recruit its capacity of 
enjoyment for the repletion of the morrow; — in all 
the grandeur of its serenity, the time, I say, so much 
impressed me, that when my companion left, unused, 
albeit, to "spend my prodigal wits in bootless rhymes," 
I could- not abstain from lamely chasing the idea of 



THE APPEOACH OF NIGHT IN EDEN. 



To tranquillise the ecstatic Hours, 
A soothing umber-shade was given, 
Which Day eterne hath not in heaven — 
Nor lent to Earth, unless that powers 
Not infinite might wearied be 
By o'er-prolonged felicity. 
But who may paint — what accents tell 
The infant Sun's sublime farewell ? 
The splendor of day were palor now 
To the fulgency of his fiery brow, 
As like a god, with radiance drest, 
Whose glory gilds his couch of rest, 
He sunk within the crimsoned West. 

And now, the ruddy day-beams fleetly failing, 

Night falls on Eden as a spirit's wing. 
Fresh fragrance all th* odorous bowers exhaling. 

Inspiring which their quires forget to sing : 
The shadow spreads— a soft narcotic shield — 
And flowers breathe, in downy slumber sealed ; — 
Fair children all, yet one supremely sweet, - 

With whom, on wakening from its first repose. 
An amorous Sunbeam, raptured, chanced to meet. 

And kissed the blushing flowret to a Rose. 



NIGHT IN EDEN. 227 

And streamlets rilled a softer tune 

As o'er their ripples shed the Moon 

A paler, scarce less lucid ray, 

Than that which burnished them by day ; 

And while each bliss-o'erburdened sense 

Was hushed in quietude intense. 

There issued from a viewless clime, 

Such strains as when, in quires sublime, 

To gushing harps, the ardent hymn 

Bursts from the bright-eyed cherubim ; 

While high above and from afar 

Streamed melody from many a star : — 

O, had those stars been Luna's daughters, 

They might have paused in their career — 

Perchance have left their stellar sphere — 

To linger over Eden's waters, 

Where, mirrored, shone each pearly gem 

That glistened in Night's diadem, 
Each lovely in the bright emblazoned sky 

As Vestal fair to Beauty's crown aspiring, 
Seen by the light of her own jetty eye, 

Ere dimmed by tears — or too devout admiring^ 



Night reigned : soft Zephyrs that by day 
Did now in sportive dalliance stray 
Where'er a new Perfume had birth. 
Would then in fragrance flee away 
To tempt the mighty Sea to play. 



228 CHAPTER VI. 

The exulting Main, in giant mirth 
And joyous unison with Earth, 
Tossed high, in ecstasy, his spray. 
But Rapture lulled itself to rest 
When Phcebus Paradise had blest. 
And Eden donned her night-array; 
Then hushed grew Ocean, placid Sleep 
In starlit slumber stilled the Deep. 

'Twas an exquisite hour, that reign of Night, 

So blissful and dreamy in its delight 

That Earth might have longed for none other light 
Yet silence seemed a state forlorn 
When, from the roseate East, the Morn 
Roused, and redecked, that vernal scene 
To vivid joy, in sparkling sheen ; 
Till Eden wore so glad a smile. 
It might e'en seraphim beguile. 



C. — The notion of the stars being daughters of 
the moon, would hardly pass unscathed by the good- 
humoured satire of your logical friend, I should think; 
nor would you escape censure from le heau sexe, for 
the imputation of vanity conveyed under a figure (you 
will excuse my candour,) rather difficult of digestion. 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 229 

E. — When I " showed" to the quaint comrade of 
my youth this " wandering"* of my old age, he fixed 
on that identical figure for jocular criticism, remarking, 
" Your making the moon a mother of the stars suggests 
the application of a popular phrase to comets, if you 
include them in the number of Luna's children; and 
nothing can be easier to conceive, than the virtuous 
astonishment of the better-behaved members of the 
starry family at the wild ways of their erratic sisters. 
I fancy I see the pale and prudish planets, looking 
at a comet in its disorderly courses, like a maid from 
the backwoods beholding the passing of a rail-train — 
half-frighted, half-amazed; and senses so rarified as 
yours are, might, I dare say, hear the cold virgins, 
as the blazing comet swept rudely by them, making 
inquiries as to the moon-mother's knowledge of its 
whereabouts." And then I was ungratefully attacked 
by the bairn whose rearing I have superintended from 
babyhood, (and whose quibble you curiously re-echo,) 
touching the ofifensive insinuation of vanity aux dames. 
But I am able to repel your accusation, that the 
figure is outr^, unless you similarly impeach great 

* " O! where have I been all this time? — how tended, 
That none, for pity, show'd me how I wandered?" 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 



230 CHAPTER VI. 

Milton: for in his paraphrase of the hundred and 
thirty-sixth psalm, he mentions with the Creator's 
works, 

" The horned moon that shines by night, 

Among her spangled sisters bright :" 

and when you consider how, with "inaudible and 
noiseless step" she moves and watches, with more 
than a sister's patience, through the long night-hours, 
and enters (no respecter of persons, like her God!) 
through the tiniest lattice, so it be cleanly and un- 
curtained, and in sweet stealth advances till she kiss 
the face of the sleeping, leaving him bright dreams 
as her blessing; and how she passes away again, but 
lingeringly — oh! very lingeringly, to shine on other 
slumbers, until that dazzling " god who brings the 
Day, mounts up," and dissipates the visionary spell — 
in its silvery structure too etherial to exist in the red, 
rapturous riot of the rousing Morn : — all this assiduity 
and solicitude of Madame la Lune, Sir Censor, you will 
admit to be more maternal than sisterly; so, unless 
your hardihood would cast a stone at John Milton, 
retract the charge of monstrosity in my describing 
the moon as a mother — of many lovely daughters. 

C. — Mrs. Hemans would have made a glowing 
picture of the Garden, before the arch-tempter had 



TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 2S\ 

wrought his work there, and ere our father trembled 
at the voice of God. The scene is better suited for 
the description of an imaginative and noble-natured 
woman, than it is for man; for although woman is, 
with man, " fallen from her high estate," inasmuch 
as she is exempted far more than man from the 
knowledge of evil, and is far more conversant with 
" whatsoever things are pure," her qualifications to 
imagine a condition of innocence, are manifestly- 
superior to his. In her Despondency and Aspiration, 
the highly-gifted Mrs. Hemans has poured out a 
torrent of brilliant conceptions — a guarantee of her 
power to have made a most luxuriant and living 
landscape of Eden, in the flush of its first perfection. 
£J. — When I read that Poem, I considered that, 
resplendent as is its language, great must have been 
the injury inflicted on her thoughts, by subjection to 
the proces-verbal necessary before the presentation of 
an Idea to the public. But — tolerate this one last 
remark — who may calculate the crippling efiect of 
reducing to words the imagery of the wonderful and 
mighty mind of Milton ? Is it debatable, think you, 
— would it be by any one contested, that the author 
of the Paradise Lost, having no equal in the sub- 
limity of his conceptions, had ever an equal sufierer 



CHAPTER VI. 

from the deficiencies of language adequate to their 
incorporation and expression — though Speech to him 
was like a deep-toned shell,* struck by a prophet's 
hand; — he was omnipotent over numhers. But the 
mean mind in motion is still meaner when it records 
that motion. Language and speech may communicate 
much that stirs within ; they may interpret ideas whose 
outlines are defined — conceptions which dwell within 
compass : but when the imagination hurries into the 
far depths of a starry sky, or dives into the stirless 
mysteries of its own being, or rises in conjecture to 
the sphere of its ultimate destiny — then Thought is 
lost in the chaos of its own creations. For speech, 
potent prerogative as it is, hath no part in the subtler 
and intenser emotions which prevail, when the soul 
holdeth holy-day beyond the barriers of earth, and 
feels (heavenliest perception !) its affinity with a king- 
dom and kindred higher and holier than itself. But 
this rare, stirring sense of royalty has no audible 
articulation, nor may the after-mind, subdued and 
sunken, translate its visionary creation : — all that sur- 
vives the deluge of divine light is known but as the 
shadowy phantasms of a dream — as a bright and 
beautiful illusion, which a breath destroyed ! 



* Gray's Ode— The Death of Hoel. 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 



" Spirit-stirring Thomas Carlyle lias fancifully balanced our 
Indian Empire against our William Shakspeare.— Of course 
his loyal heart heaved the Empire aboon the beam. Descending 
from Men to Words, which could we Englanders best dispense 
with — our Colonies, or the word home?" — E. 

In the month of September in every year invariably, 
the Old Man, winsome Lady ! with whom thou hast 
thus far borne, was wont to abandon Ivy Lodge, and, 
during the presidency-in-chief of the harvest-moon, 
to sojourn at the place of his birth: occasionally also 
in merry May his salutary face was tui-ned thither- 
wards. Attendant on " these accustomed annual 
rounds," there were " partings" at the Lodge, not 
by any means " sudden," or of that romantic fervency 
which a bold poetic figure describes as pressing the 
heart's life out, but full enough of pathos to dim the 



2S6 CHAPTER VII. 

Elder's eye. E, accounted for such emotions, and 
justified what sterner systems of flesh and blood 
might designate as weakness or effeminacy, by the 
argument that these autumnal visitations were made 
in serious rather than in holiday meaning ; that Time, 
with seemingly-increasing celerity, was conducting 
him into close proximity with that critical withdraw- 
ing-gate by which all Earth's human company retire, 
after visits varying in duration, but by authoritative 
premonition announced and by accumulating evidence 
approved to terminate about the threescore-and-tenth 
year, elude as we may the fatal beck of humankind's 
gaunt Scene-shifter; and that when, as the ancient of 
years, he returned to the spot from whence was 
dated his beginning of days, he moved, though not 
with heavy heart, " as though his steps were tow'rds 
a tomb," for when his little life should be rounded 
by its second sleep, it was there, in his own familiar 
sod, that he desired to be laid down. 

Of the Elder's feathered dependents two especial 
favorites, the Queen Dowager and Sir Fred, were 
chosen to accompany him into country quarters, a 
measure adopted not so much from E.'s passion for 
music as to avert their self-inflicted martyrdom in the 
cause of abstinency — a suicidal zeal in which, or 



CHAPTER VII. 237 

desperate chagrin at his absence, had once nearly 
reduced them to barebones during an autumnal re- 
cess of the rightful Purveyor. The impassive Ben- 
jamin was indispensable as compagnon de voyage, so 
that he also migrated; and while the rural sojourn 
lasted^ the guardianship of the Lodge was delegated 
to a trusty old official who first entered the service 
in the year 10 (eighteen prior centuries understood); 
and when the pro tern, governor had lent respectful 
audience to E.'s last iteration of injunctions^ de totis 
rehus et quihusdam aliis, he sustained in his steward- 
ship a burden of responsibility, compared with which 
Lord Ashburton's was a bagatelle, when he undertook 
the business of the boundary-question and the ticklish 
task of pacifying noisy brother Jonathan. 

A green valley bosoming an old grey temple down 
in the fertile south of Hants, was the scene whereon 
E.'s eyes first opened to a world very "unintelligible" 
to infants and philosophers. A sentiment planted 
by invisible agency, and fostered by unseen dew that 
gathers at the dawn of sentiency, stimulates in after- 
life, even in the sordid, a complacent regard for the 
spot of his first unconscious debut in the character 
of Mewler and Puker in a nurse's arms ; — relaxing to 
the risible muscles of the most austere is the reflection, 

Q 



23S CHAPTER VII. 

that he surmounts the actual hearth where his infan- 
tine riotings were rocked into repose, which Colic, 
not Care, invaded then; or that he paces, with the 
step of manly vigor, the sphere of his early enterprises 
in the critical art of self-dependent locomotion. — 
Firmly, indeed, is the ligature which binds man to 
his birthplace woven into the curious fabric of the 
heart's affections; strongly twined must it be there 
with the " silver cord," to resist unbrokenly all 
subsequent idolatries — to abide ineradicable by Time, 
and maintain its prominent relief through all his 
motley augmentation of devices. Faith is avowedly 
fantastical in many of its propositions ; but certainly 
that article cannot be deemed a fantasy which con- 
tends, that mankind are marked by local as well as 
by ancestral lineaments ; — that from tJie place in which 
" careless childhood strayed," as from a metaphysical 
matrix, we deduce to our moral constitution a con- 
formity or semi-conformity to its distinctive features. 
It is the intellectual character receiving its idiosyn- 
crasy in secret, as did the physical frame its members ; 
— the imperceptible fashioning of its faculties " yet 
being imperfect" or " when as yet there was none of 
them." The tokens of this local lineality may remain 
undeveloped for years : If in early life we start into 



CHAPTER VII. g39 

scenic extremes — if the embryo-man be hurried, 
while yet a child, from the hamlet to a city, and 
thrust into the hot throng, then its long-continued 
pressure is of resistless power: nor only of power 
upon the character in that peculiarly-elastic period, 
but also on caution-and-cavil-bound maturity the 
influence successfully works, subjugating by sheer 
incessancy of operation; for we are wisely made of 
plastic clay, of which Circumstance (always under 
omniscient control) is the potter ; and in the constantly- 
revolving crucible of Custom the sternest stuff is 
shapen into a fitness for its uses. But the hour 
arrives to many, (and especially about the period of 
the first of two momentous crises, when the frivolities 
of youth are found distasteful and the earnest Man is 
consolidating,) that in half-active, half-involuntary 
retrospection, the thinking being, in his review of 
bygone times and scenes, is reminded by Memory — 
that mental resurrectionist — of many sensations quick- 
ened in a season which, if it were careless, was 
sometimes visited by Thought in its vagrancy ; and as 
he grows increasingly intent upon the hours when an 
holiday made a light heart, and a light heart was 
happiness, a host of long-dormant emotions revive — 

emotions too, dreamy for clear, comprehensible recog- 

q2 



240 CHAPTER VII. 

nition, which swam along the young heart's current, 
like fleecy clouds that float about the sun — pleasant 
then to feel in their sphere, as are the fleecy clouds to 
look at, when in amber-and-carmine glory they linger 
in the western heavens, steeped in the splendor of 
the day-god's exit. And if in infancy it were the 
lot of such reflective being to be " nursed at happy 
distance" from the jaundiced atmosphere of dense 
cities, he may remember how the waterfall seduced 
him from the sport, to sit and gaze at its prismatic 
flow; and how the echoes of mirth seemed a sound 
profane in the sanctity of an old wood's silence; or 
how, on the steep hill's summit and awearied, he laid 
himself down and would have slept, but that his eye 
was attracted heavenwards, and all incapable of com- 
prehending the spell which kept him wakeful, he 
there in charmed recumbency acknowledged 

" The witchery of the soft blue sky." 

When, a week after E.'s arrival, I followed him 
to the home of his childhood, and mingled with its 
many charms, I felt this faith in the moulding influ- 
ence of familiar scenery substantiated; for in his 
Waller-like aflection for ^' harmony, and grace, and 
gentlest beauty," it was easy to recognise the taste 



CHAPTER VII. 241 

and disposition which Nature unthwarted would, as 
a matter of course, foster to their full growth and 
strength, through the medium primarily of contact — 
of habitual gazing upon and heart-intercourse with 
the surpassing loveliness encinctured in that tranquil 
vale — itself to be regarded by such as look earnestly 
into this vast Illustrated Volume, the World we live 
in, as a vignette, elaborately wrought and purposed 
to display how sweet a smile animates all features — . 
despite the digital-on-lip monition of Silence — when 
Beauty, on mountain or in valley, hath mutual occu- 
pancy with Quietude. And tracing, with the Old 
Man, the free hills over which his foot-of-youth had 
sprung lustily, the deep glades, stream-intersected 
fields, and verdant woods now robing in their autum- 
nal vestment, it was without the range of possibilities 
to resist a certain contagion engendered by his en- 
thusiastic pride in his birthplace. 

More than six thousand souls are said to locate in 
the bosom and about the extremities of that fair valley, 
before whose charms, had he by chance confronted 
them, Lorraine would surely have set up his easel; 
— the Laureate, could he yet see them and create 
associations, would not leave Tintern Abbey Revisited 
in its pre-eminency among home-touches, for of this 



242 CHAPTER VII. 

" green pastoral landscape/' as of that, a noble time- 
worn Abbey is the primal grace ; — and conld it come 
in the halcyon hues of sweet eventide under survey 
of Sir Christopher North, the world might rejoice in 
a supplementary Recreation, and his lustrous picture 
of Windermere at Sunset not longer live alone in its 
glory. 

As to mine Ancient, pride in the natural beauties 
of this Valley~of-the-Test was tantamount to a passion ; 
and it was not unamusing to note his prurient impa- 
tience for a candidate whom to initiate and accompany 
in his " noviciate of delight." So it was hastily upon 
the clearance of that comfortablest of all repasts, the 
matutinal, that we sallied forth towards his former 
" daily walks and ancient neighbourhood." Really 
that day, apart from the pleasures of our reconnoitre, 
and on the score of its intrinsic merits, throws over 
the reminiscence of a gorgeous reality a charm not 
inferior to the couleur-de-rose effect striven for by 
poet-painters of Luxury and the East. Patient living 
and moving long before under such frequency of 
misrepresentation as God's meek sky is subject to in 
British Babylon, and groping (so to say) in heaven's 
light seen under double disparagement — exterior 
dimness brought about by sombrous vapors, inter- 



CHAi'TER VII. S48 

changed officially with denseness from interior cob- 
webj in charitable semi-political superstition conserved 
from crushing besom of destruction through years 
of multiplying spider-film on film; — patient abiding 
under comparative eclipse might have predisposed 
us, beneath that bright-blue, bare-breasted sky, to 
somewhat fraternise in feeling with an old man, 
fabricator of our primeval pantalons, who, awhile 
blinded by removable cataract, on first scarce-reaccess 
of light exclaimed, " A thousand suns!" Yet in 
good truth might that day of exploitation have been 
given and accepted in its entireness as a Septembral 
master-piece, — a day whose respirations, one would 
fancy, were sufficiently redolent with rich autumnal 
odours to have embalmed, and so in some manner 
have preserved, its loveliness. Beauty of which even 
eloquence could make but faint praise, and fragrance, 
not to be syllabled, rising up from Earth, as incense 
from an altar co-extensive with, and impregnating, 
the wide firmament, afibrded no ^;/^suitable support 
to that theory of the day's self-embalming ; but an old 
enactment and innumerable precedents were adverse, 
and the flushed Hours — predestined victims of Con- 
sumption — looked round them and yielded-up the 
ghost, after the manner of a long line of predecessors. 



244 CHAPTER VII. 

That very estimable item in the details of a sound 
constitution — freedom of debate, is often exercised 
without Reference to equitable or even reasonable 
duration ; and for our own part we have greater confi- 
dence that good would accrue from a fair debating- 
society sort of restriction upon talk^ especially wild 
political talk, than from political suffrage sidled into 
ballot-boxes. Eambling regenerators, advocating 
short parliaments, could not consistently oppose a 
system for abbreviating speeches \ else, with an influx 
from the league, a weary yarn of verbiage, wrought 
by half-a-dozen orators, might stretch its suffocating 
length over an entire session. Not to lose my own 
loquacious Guide by wandering into the arid wastes 
of political oratory, nor to class his with the vain 
babblings of the disaffected, it is expedient at once to 
observe, that throughout his garrulous guidance few 
pauses admitted further remark from the object guided 
than a consenting " yea," to eulogy passed upon 
ubiquitous loveliness. Taciturn never, here, upon 
his natal soil, E. took to himself the part of commen- 
tator-in-chief as a right, allowed by human sense of 
becomingness and animal. — The proclamation of Morn 
by another herald on this individual chanticleer's 
rightful stercoraceous pinnacle — could such infringe- 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 245 

ment be tolerated by Propriety or the lawful pos- 
sessor? 

We have left the Elder's abode, and are passing 
through a churchyard — the northern front of a noble 
pile before us, in all the impressiveness of antiquity 
and stateliness of cathedral proportions. 

" But pause we not now/' said E. " for more than 
momentary admiration of this holy temple, which 
imposes reverent contemplation for its use-sake, and 
to which Time lends a solemnising grandeur, like 
plaintive holy melody at sun-decline to a radiant 
sabbath-eve. Though there rest above its massive 
sanctity " the clear blue air of Peace," yet the glad 
Morning-Sun smiles on its walls with a power which 
makes the time exultative, and one's temper in tur- 
bulent unison with the time: an altogether calmer 
hour therefore for survey there — the serene eve for 
the silent shrine, to which our spirits rather than our 
bodies go, touched with " a sense sublime" that the 
Spirit which pervades all places is there more pal- 
pably, and that in the air we breathe within those 
hallowed precincts there mingles an empyrean unc- 
tion. Hold our weakness in derision, ye whose 
strong minds esteem as superstitious a pious regard 
for consecrated walls — think scorn of the pleasant 



246 CHAPTER VII. 

land to which our hearts wing their way in this 
"idolatry;" but not more innocuous were ponderous 
artillery levelled at a flight of fairies, than are your 
" wise saws" spent at the root of healthful Supposition. 
Affections withal, whose name is Legion, rise up in 
rhythmic and prosaic argument, protesting against 
your devastating ideal worlds whose bliss commoves 
the deep inner fount of Ecstasy, and liberates emotions 
uninterpretable in the cold idioms of this working 
world. 

" Call ^ The Counterpart of Paradise' a title un- 
merited by this place present, and the offering of a 
pair of turtledoves shall not appease our righteous 
indignation. — Nor am I prepared to permit the Curse 
to have cast its shadow over the scene to which I 
refer thy comparisons. Here, by this pathway in each 
day trodden by every intermediate step between the 
totterings of infancy and old age, here pealed, in 
May, fi:om the fascinated foliage of this wayside tree, 
most musical, most melancholy tones, to the original 
of which, when struck in Eden by the primal nightin- 
gale, our mother Eve might charmedly have listened, 
and by her grandbairns-male be not upbraided for 
bidding her goodman Adam suspend his soft discourse, 
while the sweetest of the feathered kind poured out 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 247 

his amorous plaint to the loveliest of the floral. Here, 
though on both hands are habitations, here cease- 
lessly he chanted through the still night-watches, — 
yon mimic waterfall and he twin rufflers of ^ the 
raven-down of Darkness' — as it swelled whelmingly, 
that nightingale-soprano, upon the low water-bass, 
carrying divine illusions into the dreams of the in- 
nocent sleeping within the circle of his song. He, 
of lovely lays the lavish melodist, metes out his min- 
strelsy listless to the praises of our kind and the 
reproaches of his own, and, from slumber broken by 
his ear -piercing song, uprauses the lithe lark — 

" Companion of the Morning-star at dawn, 
And of the dawn co-herald ; — 

minstrel scarce second in our love, for he, right bonnie 
bird, mounts with no fretful note through the grey 
humid ether to mingle his matinsong with the music 
of the spheres, where, high in heaven, he sees, far 
down in the fulgent East, the crimson heralds of the 
King of Day, long ere the monarch dawns upon our 
world — though he, too, sovereign Sol, moves at this 
season with no sluggard-step towards us : nor may we 
marvel much at his celerity; — the Earth, all-glorious 
in adornments, like a loving bride awaits his presence 



^48 CHAPTER VII. 

for consummation of happiness ; and mucli good would 
it do fair dames and ' gentlemen in England, then a- 
bed/ to come out and see how the fine old Fire-King 
frowns away the beleaguered clouds that interpose 
'twixt him and the bride he is rising royally to bless, 
till the outspread profusion of her charms is all un- 
veiled, and at her ten thousand sparkling recognitions 
of her krd, his frown relaxes to a smile, that, in its 
infectious power to gladden, makes the beholder's 
blood dash jocundly against its veiny channels, like 
jetty spray which, when merry winds kiss trippingly 
his sunny waves, old Ocean throws about in the reck- 
lessness of mirth, not ire. 

" A stream of water, and — where ' scaly colonies' 
are known to abound, as in the Test here — its in- 
separable agitators in human shape, belaboring its 
innocent surface. The pursuit of Walton, nathless 
the persuasives of Sir Christopher, and Izaak's own 
plaintive desire 

" To angle on, and hope to have 
A quiet passage to the grave," 

has had no pleasure for me, since, of auld lang syne, 
I heard Andrew Marvell weeping his slain fawn, — 
sovereign Shakspeare correcting the notion prevalent 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 249 

as to petty corporal pangs, — and saw (for it is a thing 
to see,) Pope's picture of confiding Meekness in the 
form of a lamb, vainly spending its last look of fond- 
ness upon Ruthlessness in the form of man, — and 
warmed at the furnaces of fine human feeling that 
glow about the pages of Gowper. These, and other 
hearings, seeings, and feelings, have jointly originated 
one strong sentiment, sunk deeply into our sense of 
humanity, — no fugitive chord of appeal to Pity, but 
an abiding principle, rendering it more than mere 
squeamish aflfectation of tenderness which reprobates, 
when followed for voluntary pastime, the sports that 
have their consummation in the agonies of God's 
creatures. 

" Another stream, branching from the copious 
Test — in main-flow and streamlets the Nile to our 
valley's fertility, chief giver of ' glory to the grass.' 
A landscape, however fair its form, if it want the \ 
fertilising feature of a broad river and its subsidiaries, \ 
in sun or moonlight seen like luminous meandering 
veins, is comparatively but as a vision of dry bones, 
or comely frame wanting the flowing heart. And yet 
another stream ! source of the clatter of this brawling 
mill : like a place imperial, under occasional aspects, 
how placid the; head, how foamy and contentious the 



250 CHAPTER VII. 

tail. By-and-by we will amble along the upward 
bank, for rigbt dear to us is water-side walking, save 
when that stealthiest of isms. Rheumatism, assumes a 
menacing attitude on the stream's margin, and clouds, 
" black with breeding thunder" or heavily-laden with 
Caledonian mist, fresh from the north and dusky as 
colliers, are discharging their embargoes. Standing, 
in the lull of care, on an " enamelled bank," a lucid 
stream is a spectacle so beguiling to both eye and 
mind, that, unfel't, the fancy winds its way into, the 
heart that it is stedfast in its bright serenity; nor till 
the heavens lower or a rude wind ruffles its radiant 
tranquillity does the conviction return, that in glory 
or in gloom it is passing, perpetually passing away: 
— ever, ever eloquent as a Maximist to mortal man ; 
for in how many delicious moods, and mostly when 
'^ life has seemed a thing divine," have we forgotten 
its incessant fluxion; and peaceful in perchance a 
perilous oblivion, might still have forgotten, had not 
a cloud overshadowed our comfort, and sent out its 

] monitory voice — ^ Onwards ! unretreatingly onwards, 

\ to the ocean in which all waters meet !' 

** Not more seemingly-stirless is yon blue veil, 
through which all angels of good taste must pleasedly 
be peering in a morn like this — not more waveless 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 251 

that cerulean drapery which hides from us their 
happy faces^ than to this moment was the element 
here in its upper flow. Our heart, though slackened 
in its paces, resumes its wonted speed at smiles, seen 
in the looks of happy things or human face divine; 
and therefore is it now a welcome incident, the advent 
of that sportive Zephyr, who hath found his way to 
the Sunbeams here, and, like new-encountering mates 
emboldened by the indulgent Mother's known con- 
sent, merrily they gambol on the stream's bosom. 
'Twas like the acumen of Edmund the Gentle to feel 
that even a bower of bliss were incomplete without 

' The gentle warbling wind, low answering to all ;' 

and in ' that sweet isle where Venus keeps her court,' 
* glorious John' Dryden, with a like discretion, re- 
quires the ingredient of ' a fanning wind,' in concert 
with the ^ purling streams,' to constitute an effective 
lullaby to Iphigenia. These ripples, which seem to 
rise in response to ^ the warbling wind,' give a hap- 
pier look to the stream's face than it wears in sad or 
shining stillness : Water, in bright day or ' starry 
night, is beautiful and fair,' even in calm — so is the 
sleeping face of Beauty, though before the closed eye 
there flit no dreamy visions of heaven's bliss to dimple 



262 CHAPTER VII. 

the cheek — so is a garden before sunrise, with its 
flowers yet ^ full of the dew of heaven as a lamb's 
fleece;' but when the sun rises,, the dew that hung 
like tears upon the leaves and flowers, glows on 
them like a garniture of stars — as if, having no duty 
in the Night-queen's service while the Day -king was 
in the ascendant, her starry retinue had abandoned 
belt and wain and milky way, to celestialise terres- 
trial flower-beds. Accept, however, ^ the glory and 
the gleam' to be verily but luminous dew, the dew- 
drops' debt to the sun's ray is as Beauty's to the 
nante Joy. 

" We say, in soberness not surpassed by Father 
Mathew, Fie upon all pharisaical assumption, but the 
man or woman who scofl*s at the oral attribute of 
flowers, is a subject for devout pity. The Laureate 
(long life to him !) as High-priest of the True Faith, 
would not be unwilling to receive the names of and 
ofler his prayers for the would-be credulous — for the 
obdurate, peradventure, his sighs. Surely as many 
of us as are concerned in making meet use of our five 
senses, are ' in bonds' to the Poets — chiefly to such 
as trace for us the bold or delicate anatomy and life 
of things, — to see, as Cowley mellifluously sings, 

' how prettily they smile, 
And hear how prettily they talk.' 



.THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 253 

What barren infidelity now in the idea, that the 
perfume borne 

' Upon the gentle wing- of this calm-breathing wind,' 

was caught from taciturn children of Flora in that 
miller's garden. Tush! no fragrance this of voice- 
less flowers. — There were love-confessions in course 
of murmuring among them when the breeze came 
by, and having loitered to listen to their amours, 
'tis their odorous secrets that he is babbling about. 
Plaintive-pleasaunt Robert Herrick sets all scruples 
against the reasonableness of this belief at rest for 
ever : the stifi'-neckedst sceptic must, tearfully it may 
be, confess himself chastened and improved by these 
few words of his to weeping Primroses : 

' Speak, whimp'ring younglings, and make known 
The reason why 
Ye droop and weep. 
Is it for want of sleep 
Or chUdish luUabie? 
Or, that ye have not seen as yet 
The violet? 
Or brought a kisse 
From that sweetheart to this? 
No, no: this sorrow, shown 

By your teares shed, 
Wo'd have this lecture read, 
That things of greatest, so of meanest, worth, 
Conceived with grief are, and with teares brought forth.' 

R 



254 CHAPTER VII. 

Bobert Herrick's flowers have mostly ' paly faces/ 
and a habit of dropping dolefully their heads and 
sighing deeply in their discourse; few of them look 
up with that innocent pertness of eye, which, when 
it accosts you, would gaze you into good humor 
though you had just heard of a depression of the 
stocks — monetary not floral. But pensive Robert 
goes among the gay ephemeral things like the thought- 
ful tender-hearted Pastor of a parish among his 
little ones, who, while he would not have them one 
whit less happy, but rather say, with amiable Bowles, 
* Sport on ! ' moralises upon their mirth, mindful that 
their young hearts are born to sorrow, and seeing, 
with his instructed eye, 

/ ' what Grief must nurture for the sky, 

\ What Death must fashion for eternity.' 

Yet is Robert's language, in speaking to or of the 
flowers such as tender fathers use to their wee things, 
and such as only true love prompts; so may the 
xlmaranth have for ever lost its mournful significancy 
to the immortal, Robert Herrick. 

" What with the loud hum of this exulting bee, 
who has thrice flown foul of our phiz at a broadside, 
honey-burdened no doubt to very blindness — what 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 255 

with, his stentorian murmur and the shrill uproar on 
both hands of these bacchanals in clover, ycleped 
grasshoppers, we are positively in danger of losing 
the supreme satisfaction of hearing ourself. A brief 
hint apropos, in thy ear, O absolute Abstainer from 
inebriating beverages, touching a contrary propensity 
of that determined hahitue of. dewy lily-bells, the 
^ humdrum grasshopper.' In ourself, an attachment 
to a liquid which thou anathematisest, is too matured 
a weed to be eradicated — nor are the spectacles yet 
invented by means of which, with the narrative of a 
certain marriage in Cana in memory, we could discern 
the poison lurking in temperate administrations of a 
certain creature-comfort, whose property it is to make 
the heart glad. Yet, barring our prejudices, which 
are ultra in this matter, and conceding that a counte- 
nance by the grape made cheerful may be condem- 
nable, and that there may be a chaster virtue in 
tealeaves, we commend to thy proselytising efforts 
the grasshopper family, consisting as it does of deil- 
may-care kind of gentry, who are said by Abraham 
Cowley and E,ichard Lovelace (both unexceptionable 
authorities,) to drink immoderately — and voild at this 
moment a debauchee, in whom the poppy is evidently 
at work, taking double bounds in dissolute despera- 

R 2 



256 CHAPTER VII. 

tion. Cowley, if our memory be not misty (as it 
commonly is till our after-dinner tumbler verges a 
second time towards a vacuum), the aforesaid Abra- 
ham denominates the wine consumed in this shameless 
wight's potations, as ' Dewy Morning's/ which Dame 
Nature, illicitly, and with no fear of excisemen before 
her eyes, pours into yellow-cups and blue-bottles in 
such extravagant profusion, that every green field is 
in effect a carte hlanche to the thirsty grasshopper. 
The testimony of Lovelace is still more conclusive, 
and affirms the dewbibber to be addicted to a novel 
and rather poetic honne bouche; — he, Richard Love- 
lace, deponeth the accused to be * drunk every night 
with a delicious tear ! ' and finding no palliation for a 
line of conduct so abandoned, we commit the profli- 
gate to the consideration of the tents. 

" We have mounted this Green-hill at various 
paces and in various moods, at intervals since '80, 
and should esteem it no venial sin to pursue our 
upward march without turning at this point to 
admire. Test this Valley-of-the-Test by Cowper's 
standard of beauty, and the scene approves itself a 
champion as to its charms, since, daily viewed, it 
daily pleases. Let the dew have had its dazzling 
hour with the daybeams, and ' bright Phoebus in his 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 257 

strength.' have routed incipient chills which harbour 
in the heather a little after dawn, and then let any or 
all in whom is a heart of love to God's works sit 
here upon this hillside; and not by dint of devout 
invocation to Fancy to waft the soul forth on light 
wings into ether that obliterates the real, but by rapt 
silent survey of the placid face of this actual landscape, 
should he or they confess, on the breaking of the 
spell, how perfectly had been steeped in oblivion the 
consciousness of mutability — how entirely they felt, 
now that feeling had returned to them, 

* As if the moving time had been 

A thing as stedfast as the scene 

On which they gazed themselves away.' 

To more than one artist have we propounded this 
question. What needs this scene to render it con- 
summate? and the limners, like echoes, have each 
responded, ^ What ! ' And many a time too have 
we thought, that of the accumulated graces gathered 
in yon amphitheatre 'twould be only considerate to 
forewarn spring, summer, and autumn travellers, to 
scenic enchantment susceptive, ere, speeding from 
the West, they are whirled from the ambush of that 
highway-line of trees into the scene's sudden glory. 



^58 CHAPTER VII. 

where all Nature's works are perfect and where Man's 
chiefest work is his best work — an habitation for his 
God! The sheltering hills — see how they throw 
their circling arms around that lowland loveliness, 
and how themselves, at base and side and summit, 
are studded with trees, dense in their foliage as clouds 
that cradle storms — summer-storms, having red light- 
nings in their retinue, which burnish their cloudy 
cradle; for touched is all that leafy pride with the 
first tint of the golden autumnal dye, — the forest's 
hectic-^flush which beautifies but surely precedes 
Decay. And — -gazing even charmedly — fleetly upon 
the sense of sight steals languor, from yonder lucid 
streams which at this eminence are neither heard nor 
seen to flow, and from the fields that lay out there in 
most expansive idlesse, and from the prostrate herd 
infected by the prevailing paresse : and drowsily now 
upon the ear falls the far-ofl" melody of the invisible 
lark, who rises from his home with a heart too full 
of thankful song to abide his nest's limits, and (saving 
our exhausting self,) pours out the sole articulate 
annunciation of life in heaven above or on the earth 
beneath. And the very air and light seem in conspi- 
racy with things below to close our thoughts from 
every sphere save that in which at ' this still season 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 259 

of repose and peace' we are contented dwellers ; and 
so miglit the influence operate^ and we forget our 
high inheritance and cease to aspire^ were it not for 
the homily, to the heart, not ear, addressed by yon 
grey sanctuary, towering beyond all structures secular 
into ^ the deep, blue, glorious heavens,' — symbolising 
a nobler ' house not made with hands, eternal,' which 
our longing souls look to gain by some bright starry 
pathway through the bewitching azure; — 

' Why else so often doth the searching eye 
Roam through the scope of sky? ' 

" Thanks to the priestly influence of yonder holy 
pile, which recalls us from a state of too-entii'e 
contentment with the ravishments of earth to a re- 
membrance of ' the royalties of heaven;' and again 
we say, "Welcome to uninterrupted enjoyment of his 
freedom from weak prejudice, is the stui'dy soul who 
smiles in scorn at the doctrine that especial sanctity 
is in the place where God descends to commune with 
His contrite ones. O! to our heart of hearts, linked 
is that shrine, not only by high hopes of glory which 
kindle highest there, but by indestructible bonds 
originating with rite of baptism, bridal, burial, and 
twined about our better thoughts by the invisible 



260 CHAPTER VII. 

hand of Memory. We side with those who maintain 
the faith that Poetry, as from a central and perennial 
fount, flows right through the Universal Heart — 
though in very various eifusion ; and often is its cur- 
rent impeded, nor seldom altogether polluted and 
turned awry. There is exceeding danger of such 
impediment to or perversion of this genial bosom- 
flow, where Schism of a captious kind prevails: the 
healthy current in the veins and natural charities in 
the heart are apt to sufler — sometimes to utter sub- 
mersion — by the atribilious swamp, fed and frowned 
over by Contumacy; — yet, disclaiming glamoury, 
willingly would we challenge a scorner whose bosom's 
feelings are not wholly petrified, to remain insensible 
to the influence of the place, when, at evensong, within 
those walls, the eloquent and earnest Priest, whose 
main theme is his Master's mercy, allures to brighter 
worlds his listening flock, himself oppressed at times 
with the benign burden of his message. For while 
he urges on the world-worn to aspire after those ever- 
blissful seats whose ' omnipotently-guarded battle- 
ments Sorrow can never scale,' the deep crimson 
radiance of the setting sun pours in at many an 
eminent ingress, as if in visible attestation of his 
verbal portraiture : 'tis as a shechinah or halo from 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 261 

' the living throne and sapphire blaze/ and lends 
indescribable power to the persuasions of our Faith 
— to which, while the spirit listens, strongly it stirs 
to put on etherial panoply, and launch away on that 
resplendent flood, and float on the rich undulations 
of angelic song, to the clime of Perfect and Perpetual 
Joy. 

" We have no sympathy with field-preaching, and 
shudder to see the sword of the Spirit so profanely 
handled that its rude usage incites to ribaldry ; and 
if you are called, in justification, to witness proofs of 
an efiectual home-thrust, a miserable spectacle con- 
fronts you of laceration and contortion, and Reason 
goaded to the verge of idiocy or black abysm of 
despair. But out-of-door perception should quicken 
well-attempered praise; — then ought to stir * the 
feeling infinite :' and certain pens with whose poetic 
flow there mingles cogent theology, might interestingly 
— perhaps suasively — maintain a gentle controversy 
with our church-divines, alleging that all this obvious 
creation — by Chateaubriand called ^ the imagination 
of the Deity rendered visible / by Carlyle, ' the 
visible Thought of God' — might advisedly be more 
frequently enlarged upon, and the recital of the Great 
Spirit's claims to our allegiance be more efficiently 



262 CHAPTER VII. 

enforced by winning demonstrations that, though 
humankind be dull and disaffected, a host of things 
around us — to our humiliation if we felt aright — 
reflect back Heaven's goodness in the beauty and 
deep joy of gratitude. Meseems a mild teacher, him- 
self impressed, might so clarify the dim eye and 
attune the drowsy ear, that Love, born of Rapture, 
should spread its wings for delighted upward flight, 
at a thousand novel impulses. For ever open are the 
pages of this vast Volume of the Universe, and yet 
how few discern that they are richly illuminated with 
elaborate initials traced by the finger of the Lofty One? 
From the incessantly-reiterated doctrinal terms of the 
Deity one finds refreshing alterative pasture in the 
company of endearing Bishop Taylor : not that he is 
unmindful of the priest's imperative part, but that 
he so oft enlists Nature as an auxiliary in his minis- 
trations. How the having promise of the life which 
now is, and that which is to come, throws its joyous 
lambent light over the page that bears this passage : 
— ' I am fallen into the hands of publicans and 
sequestrators, and they have taken all from me. 
What now ? Let me look about me. They have left 
me sun, and moon, and fire, and water; a loving wife, 
and many friends to pity me, and some to relieve; 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 26S 

and I can still discourse, and unless I list they have 
not taken away my merry countenance, and my 
cheerful spirit, and a good conscience : they have still 
left me the providence of God, and all the promises 
of the gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of 
heaven, and my charity to them too : and still I sleep, 
and digest, and eat, and drink; I read and meditate; 
I can walk in my neighbours' pleasant fields, and see 
the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all 
that in which God delights — that is, in virtue and 
wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God himself.' 
Thus pious Jeremy: — and, O well-judging Lady 
Blessington, seeing that in your case a bishopric is 
out of the question, we canonised you with peculiar 
pomp from the hour we knew your faith, that ' The 
poetry of our lives is — like our religion — kept apart 
from our thoughts : neither influence us as they ought. 
"We should be wiser and happier if, instead of se- 
cluding them in some secret shrine in our hearts, we 
suffered their humanising qualities to temper our 
habitual words and actions.' 



" And now, ^ beneath the branches high ' of this 
brave oak, the doctrine that 



264 CHAPTER VII. 

' Here ye may sleep 

In the moss so deep 
While the sun is so warm and so weary, 

And sweetly awake 

As the sun through the brake 
Bids the fauvette and white-throat sing cheery,' 

is no cunningly-devised fable of Mary — helpmeet of 
William Howitt, but a sound of good tidings, inge- 
nuously proclaimed by one of Nature's Own heralds, 
wooing worn mankind to partake of rest and of 
refreshing, without money and without price. And, 
like The Boundless in His Benevolence, the arms of 
Nature are ever opened widest to the world-wearied. 
Still — the Poet being the ^ Consecrator,' as truly says 
John Cameron — still, Nature's guests have need of 
such enlightenment as poets shed upon the bounty 
and the beauty of her hospitality — appreciating which, 
the participator, though he be a peasant, feels, while 
there is 

' A grandeur in the beatings of his heart,' 

that he occupies a temple, whose flooring is the 
variegated earth and whose canopy is the sheltering 
wing of God. True that an unwitting wayfarer might 
repose here, and in somnolence forget his cares and 
his fatigue ; — such solace hath ^ tired nature's sweet 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 265 

Restorer' for all but the crime-imbrued; but, unin- 
structed by the Poet, he would lie down without 
perceiving of how elaborate a texture is this couch 
of mossy greensward — more eiBorescent than a regal 
bridal-bed; and would cast but a careless look aloft, 
content that his slumber would be sheltered from 
rays, too fervent, haply, for sky-facing sleepers, but 
which Sol, who is lending his countenance to the 
ungarnered crops, could not consistently cool down, 
though the consequence were here and there an ague. 
He, the uninitated tarrier, would not and could not 
scan these curtains with an admiring eye, perceiving 
how, as to fashion, from supports in multiform device 
of branch and bough, are suspended festoons of foliage 
of dear Nature's own fantastic and delightful hanging; 
neither, as to hue, could he critically remark the 
exceeding richness of this drapery of sky-surmounted 
green in all its manifold varieties of shade — here, in- 
tensely deep, secluded from the sun; there transparent, 
in immediate recipiency of his rays: nor perchance 
might he smile to mark — though a misanthrope could 
hardly avert his eyes from thisjoj — that, as if defying 
expulsion, the stray beams will peep through and 
^lay about on sward and sleeper. Nor would he 
notice how the playful breeze 7iestles in the branches ; 



CHAPTER VII. 

— it does not care to bustle througli them, you per- 
ceive, but delights to dally there; without doubt 
blabbing — a wily whisperer ! — the love-gossip of yon- 
der gardens — for all God's creatures like to hear of 
love, and see now in what glad commotion is the old 
tree's crown, and how each several leaf sparkles as 
though it were a pendent oscillating emerald ! We 
are enamoured of life, we repeat, and would rather, 
in the flush of morn, see foliage in motion than when 
immobile. In leafy fluctuation too the birds catch a 
vivid impulse; an ecstasy electrifies each tiny wing, 
preventing comfort in quiescence, either on tipsy 
treetop or in the bright yellow broom; and if the 
breeze, as it brings along the flower-scents, be a 
wee bit frolicsome, the more wealthily will the bonny 
sky-rangers charter it with sounds of song, till the 
vagrant zephyr speeds onwards like a viewless argosy, 
whose ocean is the firmament, and whose freight is 
mirthful music and perfume. 

" O England! e'en now in this thy palmy day, 
when wars and rumors of wars have died away upon 
thine ear — e'en now, as when the garden yielded up 
its Queen to be a battle-badge, are all thy children 
kind and natural? No more may adverse factions 
jeopardise thy monarch's crown — and pleasant is it to 



THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 261 

an old man's heart to body thee forth among nations 
as a Forest King, fearful in provocation, but on whom 
the Una of our love and loyalty confidingly and 
caressingly may lay her hand: yet to despoliating 
Commerce are thy silvan scenes becoming rapidly 
defenceless prey. Who, now, in the cherished terri- 
tory of his ancestral home, may bid effective defiance 
to the huge crushing Juggernaut of thy idolisation, 
and say as with authority, Hei'e shall thy wheels be 
stayed ! The empire of Ai't is too fast subverting the 
world of Nature — Innocency is being swallowed up 
by Invention — ^ the perpetual hills do bow: ' were we 
in sighing mood, a syllogism here how conclusively 
showing cause ! But the evil shall not come in our 
days ! The murmuring rills that harbour hereabouts 
the Naiads of our dreams, shall not ruthlessly be 
blotted out, nor the woodbine wall of the Sylphs^ 
haunt be broken down by semi-barbaric intrusionists 
in owr time ; nor will we further mourn for what may 
be but ' false alarms of Fear,' but rather shout, 

" O England ! ' little body with a mighty heart P 
as felt in the halcyon contentment and profuse love- 
liness of this, one of that heart's most sweet recesses^ 
to the pilgrim of complacent mind and of contracted 
will, still teeming with delight are thy many ' primrose 



S68 CONCLUSION. 

meadow-paths and hamlets low.' Not that thou hast 
therein to gratify the voluptuary, or stir the lover of 
extremes in nature ; no rolling storm, whose thunders 
shake the soul, nor ruling calm whose luxury etiolates; 
no dizzy alp nor darkling depth : and yet full glorious 
art thou, England ! By thy surface-treasures seen in 
minster ed city, in luxuriant hamlet, in majestic wood: 
— by thy struggles with and trophies won from 
Thraldom; by the palace-homes of thine enfeebled 
Brave; by thy many halls of Charity; by thy love of 
Honor; by thy very ether, which cannot nourish 
slaves : — by the magnitude of thy power, which is all 
but infinite, and by thy docility to due control, which 
is all but perfect. Yet these are but the fruits of that 
primary glory of which yon hoary holy pile maketh 
proclamation and saith. The Faith which dignifies 
thy Sons!" 



PRINTED AT LORDAN's ROMSEY PRESS. 



SEP -2 B- 



